The door finally swung open. It wasn’t the doctor or the social worker. It was Jake. He looked haggard, his eyes bloodshot, flanked by an older man in a suit who looked like a lawyer. Jake didn’t rush to her; he stayed by the door, his hands trembling.
“Sandra,” he whispered. “I am so, so sorry. I thought it was over. I thought the records were buried.”
The lawyer stepped forward. “My name is Marcus Thorne. I represented Jake—then Ethan—twenty years ago. There has been a catastrophic administrative error in the hospital’s flagging system.”
“The fire in Blackwood wasn’t something Jake started,” the lawyer explained, placing a document on Sandra’s bedside table. “It was started by his father. Jake was sixteen. He didn’t run away. He went back into the house three times.”
Sandra looked at Jake. He was staring at the floor, his shoulders shaking.
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