She wasn’t sure what she had expected to see when she opened the door, but it wasn’t his perfectly made bed with a packet of some kind of documents on top.
Without thinking, she stepped inside and grabbed the papers.
On the top page, a note had been scrawled in Cody’s messy handwriting.
I’m sorry
She looked again at what she was holding, and she felt her stomach twist.
ExpressDNA
Your Results Are Here!
She scanned the document once, and then a second time, unable to believe what she was seeing.
But the results were crystal clear.
Cash wasn’t Cody’s biological father.
She sank to the bed, her mind reeling. This must have been the piece of mail Mrs. Waters had brought down to them. This was why Cody had been so down last night.
In the blink of an eye, the monumental change to his young life was about to be undone.
Why did you do this?she asked him inwardly.
But she knew why. Every social media post he made for the rest of his life would be filled with conjecture about why he was or wasn’t Cash’s son. Even his friends at school had expressed disbelief. Cody had probably done this in order to have somekind of proof.
And it backfired…
In her shock, she had almost forgotten that he wasn’t in the apartment, but now the panic returned.
She had no idea where he had gone or when.
Bella was on her feet again in a heartbeat, the awful papers still clutched in her hand as she ran for her phone.
Her hands shook as she pulled up the tracking app that she and Cody had for each other. But his dot was gone. He had deactivated it.
Please, God, please let him be okay.
Fear had her fighting for breath as she racked her brain for where Cody might have gone. His closest friend at school was Annika Corbin, but she didn’t think they were close enough yet for him to just show up at her house.
All of his old friends were back in Burlington. Could he be on a bus back there to try and find them?
If that was what he wanted, he would have run last night when we were already in Burlington.
She tried calling Cody’s phone, but hung up when it only went to voicemail. She called the police next out of instinct, but she already knew that if she had no idea where to look, they would have even less of a clue.
The conversation seemed to go on forever, and she was ashamed that she didn’t have more of an idea for them of where the boy might go.
“We’ll start making the rounds, ma’am,” the woman on the other end said at last. “Does he have other family he might visit?”
“No,” she said, feeling the weight of the word like an anchor on her heart.
As soon as the call ended, she knew what she had to do next.
I swore I would never be a coward again when it came to what was important.
Her fingers danced on her phone screen.
