The motel bed groans when I sit, springs complaining under the weight of three people and a day that feels longer than the whole month before it.
Styrofoam clamshells and paper cups fan out around us like a greasy halo: fries congealing in their own oil sheen, lo mein noodles stiffening into one solid knot, three untouched egg rolls lined up on a napkin. The air smells like soy sauce, burnt coffee from the lobby, and the harsh lemon cleaner the housekeeper sprayed this morning to pretend last night’s guests never happened.
The TV doesn’t pretend anything.
“—breaking developments tonight in Harbor Glen,” the anchor says, voice too bright for the footage behind him. “Where the Mercer family, long considered untouchable on their narrow peninsula of privilege, faces not only a viral exposé but a terrifying balcony collapse at their annual Light the Harbor gala.”
Video of the estate’s glass walls fills the screen, red and blue lights washing over the Mercer crest at the front entrance. B-roll cuts to the harbor itself, to boats still strung in lights, to the neat line of cliffside mansions perched above the dark water like they’re floating, literally above the law.
“You’d think they’d get tired of that phrase,” Riley mutters.
She sits to my right, cross-legged on the duvet, hoodie sleeves pushed to her elbows, chopsticks tapping against the Styrofoam carton in her lap. She hasn’t taken a bite in twenty minutes. The noodles steam faintly, heat bleeding into the room only to be swallowed by the air conditioner’s constant wheeze.
Daniel is on my left, jacket folded over the rickety chair, tux shirt wrinkled beyond rescue. A hospital wristband flashes when he rubs the side of his neck where the EMT cleaned off someone’s blood—I don’t ask whose. His plate balances on his knees, one lonely dumpling staring up at him.
“Turn it off?” he asks, but he doesn’t reach for the remote.
I shake my head.
“Not yet,” I say. “I need to know what story they’re telling.”
He exhales, a shallow sound.
“You already lived it,” he says. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Not when your mother’s PR team is probably drafting their counterprogramming right now,” I reply.
On-screen, the footage cuts to a freeze frame from an earlier live shot: Daniel on the front steps, microphones shoved toward his chest, the Mercer crest gleaming over his head. A banner crawls across the bottom: MERCER HEIR BREAKS RANKS.
“There you are,” Riley says softly.
He tenses, shoulders creeping up.
The anchor narrates over the frozen image.
“In a stunning break from the polished Mercer script,” he says, “Daniel Mercer tonight called for a ‘full, independent investigation’ into the hospital and foundation that bear his family’s name, and publicly recognized a previously hidden biological sister, investigator Riley Shaw.”
Riley makes a face.
“Previously hidden biological sister,” she repeats. “Cool. I’m a weather system now.”
A laugh scratches out of my throat before I can stop it, half hysterical, half grateful for the absurdity.
“Could be worse,” I say. “They could call you ‘mysterious brunette’ or ‘alleged love child.’”
“Give them time,” she says. “The tabloids haven’t woken up yet.”
Daniel doesn’t laugh. His fingers tighten around his plate until the thin cardboard bows.
The screen shifts to split-panel: in one box, the house; in the other, footage of Harbor Glen Memorial’s gleaming lobby. The camera lingers on the donor wall, names etched into glass, the Mercer Foundation title sitting alone at the top. The abstract wave crest repeats across plaques, brochures, the frosted glass of the foundation office door.
“That wall always creeped me out,” I say quietly. “Like a scoreboard for who matters enough to get their name carved into history.”
“It is a scoreboard,” Riley says. “They just never expected anyone to check who paid for it with missing kids instead of money.”
The anchor hands off to a correspondent who stands in front of the hospital, breath puffing in the winter air.
“While the Mercers’ lawyers declined to comment,” she says, “Harbor Glen residents describe a town where social hierarchy is literally etched into those donor walls and encoded in country club waitlists and boat parade rosters. Everyone here knows who rides on which yacht. And now, they’re asking who paid the price for that access.”
The camera cuts to the docks, to boats bobbing in the black water where the Light the Harbor parade just wound down. Reflections smear across the surface like melted Christmas lights. Somewhere beyond the cheap motel curtains, the town still smells like salt and woodsmoke and the tang of disinfectant drifting from the hill.
I stare at the boats and picture the cliff where the balcony dropped, the same drop that swallowed Lydia’s body years ago. The town built its mercy myths on that story. Tonight, they watched the staging crack.
The correspondent continues.
“Already, investigative reporters from multiple outlets are digging into archival records at Harbor Glen Memorial,” she says. “Preliminary findings suggest that the cases highlighted in tonight’s viral article may be part of a broader pattern. Several adoption files from the early 2000s appear to be missing or heavily redacted.”
I feel Riley straighten beside me.
“Good,” she murmurs. “Don’t just take my word for it. Check the damn archives.”
The correspondent’s tone drops, weightier.
“And for some families watching tonight,” she adds, “those missing records may not be abstract. They may be their children.”
The words land between the three of us, heavy and real in a way that the scrolling graphics and polished sets can’t blunt.
My plate slides on the bedspread where my hands started to shake, sauce bleeding into the faded floral pattern. The motel comforter scratches under my fingers—pilled fabric, too much detergent, faint hint of whoever smoked in here five bookings before us.
“God,” I whisper. “If there are parents out there watching this in their living rooms…”
“There are,” Riley says. She doesn’t soften it. “I’ve talked to some of them. Not Mercers specifically, but people who got told their babies died in that hospital or that their adoptions were airtight. They’re watching. They’re probably pulling out old paperwork right now.”
Daniel swallows hard.
“Which is why we have to be careful,” he says. “We can’t just—”
He stops when the screen changes again.
A grainy school portrait fills the frame. A little girl in a blue polo, smile slightly crooked, hair pulled into uneven pigtails, one elastic slipping lower than the other. The backdrop is that standard marbled studio swirl, the kind that pretends kids don’t live in real places.
My breath catches.
I don’t need the caption, but it appears anyway: RILEY SHAW, AGE 6 (COURTESY OF FORMER FOSTER FAMILY).
Riley jolts like someone hit her with a live wire.
Her chopsticks clatter against the carton. Sauce splashes onto the comforter in a dark starburst. She doesn’t look at the mess. She stares at the screen, eyes wide, hands frozen halfway between her and the bed.
“No,” she says, voice thin. “No, no, no, turn that off.”
I fumble for the remote, fingers slippery, and stab at the mute button on instinct. The sound cuts, but her childhood face stays there, trapped in fluorescent pixels, a stranger frozen at the front of America’s living room.
Daniel’s hand hovers near the remote.
“Off?” he asks.
Riley shakes her head, then nods, then presses both palms over her mouth.
I set the remote down, not trusting my own choice more than hers.
She drops her hands and coughs out a bitter laugh that doesn’t sound like laughter.
“They dug up my class photo,” she says. “Of course they did. Why talk to me when you can show me at six, back when I fit in a soundbite better.”
“We didn’t give them that,” I say. “Right? That didn’t come from—”
“Not from us.” She swipes at her eyes with the back of her wrist, angry at the moisture there. “Foster system records. School archives. People like me leave paper everywhere and never get to own any of it.”
On-screen, the muted correspondent gestures toward the photo. A scrolling sidebar pops up: WHO IS RILEY SHAW? bullet-pointing her résumé without her consent. Investigator. Foster alumni. Car crash orphan. Alleged second daughter.
“They’re turning you into a case study,” I say.
“They’ve been doing that my whole life,” she replies. “At least this time I shoved myself into the narrative on purpose.”
She lets out another shaky breath and reaches for a napkin, blotting the sauce off the bedspread like fixing that small stain is the one piece of control available in the room.
“I’m sorry,” Daniel says suddenly.
Riley looks at him, eyes still glassy.
“For what? Existing on TV?” she asks.
“For giving them a quote with your name in it,” he says. “For saying ‘my sister’ on live news without asking if you wanted that yet. I signed you up for a circus you didn’t get to consent to.”
She snorts.
“You signed me up for being acknowledged by the family that erased me,” she says. “I’ll take the circus as part of the package.”
My lips twitch despite the knot in my throat.
“Also,” she adds, “if you hadn’t said it, my lawyer side would’ve filed an emotional malpractice suit against you, so good call.”
“Do you have a lawyer side?” I ask. “Do we have a lawyer anything?”
That pulls us back to the question we’ve been circling since the drive over.
Daniel nudges his untouched dumpling with a thumb.
“We need representation,” he says. “Real representation. Not whoever my mother tries to push on us. Someone who doesn’t owe their membership to the Harbor Glen club to the Mercer Foundation.”
Riley nods.
“We need one firm for the criminal side, another for civil,” she says. “And media training before any more on-camera moments. Tonight was pure adrenaline. Next round, every word will be weaponized in depositions.”
“You were good,” I tell her. “On stage, earlier. Clear, grounded.”
“I shook so hard my teeth clicked,” she says. “Thank God for shock.”
On the TV, the panel shifts to a trio of commentators in finely lit boxes. The captions crawl without sound, but the expressions tell a lot: one skeptical, one intrigued, one openly angry on behalf of…someone. I unmute.
“—we have to be careful not to treat whistleblowers as saints,” the skeptical one says. “They have motives too. Money, attention, old grudges—”
“What money?” Riley cuts in at the TV. “Did I miss my royalty check for being trafficked as an infant?”
The angry commentator interrupts the skeptic.
“But we’re not talking about a petty family feud here,” she says. “We’re talking about credible documentation of manipulated adoption records at a major hospital. Even if these individuals have complicated motives—and who wouldn’t, with that history—the documents stand on their own.”
Daniel’s shoulders ease a fraction.
“Thank you,” he says to the screen, like she can hear him.
The intrigued commentator leans forward.
“We’re already hearing from other journalists digging into Harbor Glen Memorial,” he says. “Old malpractice complaints, sealed neonatal cases, unaccounted-for infants in early census data. Even if half of this pans out, it raises serious questions about oversight. We may be looking at a systemic issue, not a one-off scandal.”
There it is—the thing that both validates and terrifies me.
“They’re running with it,” I say. “With or without us.”
Riley nods.
“Good,” she says. “That’s the only way this survives Mercer spin. But it also means we don’t get to control which victims get dragged into the spotlight next.”
The thought pulls at something deep in my chest. I picture my mother in her tiny New Jersey kitchen, phone on the table, watching my face on the news between shots of the hospital where she once worked. I picture Mrs. Donnelly staring at her fireplace, hands blackened from burned paper, seeing her ashes reassembled into a narrative on national TV.
“We need ground rules,” I say. “For us. No solo interviews. No off-the-record promises. We coordinate before talking to anyone.”
“Agreed,” Daniel says immediately.
Riley hesitates.
“I’ve spent years chasing people who didn’t want to talk,” she says. “Part of me wants to say yes to every mic shoved in my face just to balance the scales.”
“And part of you knows that’s a bad idea,” I say gently.
She slumps back against the headboard.
“Yeah,” she says. “The part that doesn’t want kids who went through what I did re-traumatized because I got reckless on cable.”
We fall quiet for a moment.
The air conditioner rattles. Someone stomps past on the exterior walkway, boots squeaking on wet concrete. A car door slams, then another. Harbor Glen’s fancy peninsula narrows into this thin strip of asphalt outside a roadside motel, where the most powerful family in town has no control over the neighbors.
I pick up my fork and force myself to take a bite of cold rice. It tastes like cardboard and salt. My stomach flips, but I chew anyway.
“Hey,” Daniel says after a while. “For the record, I’m terrified.”
I look over at him.
“You’re doing a pretty decent impression of a man watching a mildly disappointing movie,” I say.
“Inside I’m screaming,” he answers. His mouth twists into something that isn’t a smile. “My mother is going to unleash every resource she has. Donors will turn. I might lose my job, my inheritance. There could be criminal charges for people who signed things, ignored things. I don’t even know where I fall on that line yet.”
Riley watches him carefully.
“You could walk it back,” she says. “Tell the press you spoke in the heat of the moment. That you didn’t mean ‘independent,’ you meant ‘internal review.’ Reparative reconciliation, blah blah.”
He stares at the TV, at his own face replaying on a loop at the bottom corner.
“I’m not walking it back,” he says. “I can miss my old life and still refuse to go back to it.”
He drags a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end.
“I am terrified,” he repeats. “But we did the right thing.”
The words settle into the room, quiet and solid.
For months I begged him to choose between comfort and truth. Tonight, he chose. The fear doesn’t cancel that. The courage doesn’t cancel the damage behind us. Both live in the same hands, the same voice that once defended Evelyn and now stands beside the girl she tried to erase.
Riley lifts her soda cup in a mock toast.
“To doing the right thing and regretting it in advance,” she says.
I clink my cup against hers.
“To not letting the good they did cover the lives they stole,” I add.
Daniel bumps his cup against ours, a soft plastic tap.
“To all the people watching tonight who never wanted their pain on TV,” he says. “May we not screw this up worse for them.”
We drink.
The soda has gone flat, syrupy and warm, but it anchors me better than the cold food.
On TV, the panel moves on to speculation about next steps: grand jury, subpoenas, hearings. A graphic flashes: WHAT HAPPENS NOW? bulleting out possible legal paths. Underneath, a smaller crawl announces that the state attorney general’s office has “expressed interest” and that “legislative inquiries into adoption oversight” may follow.
“There it is,” Riley says. “Chapter two.”
“Feels more like chapter twenty-three,” I say.
“Welcome to season two of my personal hell,” she replies, managing a crooked smile.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand, rattling against the cheap faux-wood.
All three of us jump.
Unknown number, local area code.
My thumb hovers over the screen. The news graphics keep looping behind us, promising investigations and hearings and people under oath. The motel room suddenly feels even smaller, every choice pressing in at once: answer now and plunge into the legal maze, or let it ring and risk losing control before we’ve even begun.
“Well?” Riley asks quietly. “Ready for the next wave?”
The phone keeps buzzing in my hand, stubborn and insistent, and I inhale once, sharp, tasting lemon cleaner and salt and fear, before I decide whether I’m brave enough to pick up.