And yet, no matter how far she had tried to run, life’s path brought Valerie back to Port Gamble and Puget Sound Hospital, which was, ironically, a lot like the prison she grew up in on McNeil Island.

Valerie spent the morning doing her director’s paperwork. The director was out on maternity leave, which meant that Valerie and the other psychiatric nurses had to pitch in. It also meant that Valerie was working double-shifts from time to time, much to the chagrin of her family.

None of the PSH nurses had gone into nursing to be administrators. Some did it for money, but most, like Valerie, had chosen the profession because they truly wanted to help people suffering from mental illnesses of the most dangerous kind.

That morning, Valerie did her best to focus on the work at hand. Yet she just couldn’t. All she could think about was the confrontation with her daughters. She’d lied to them. She’d omitted the truth before, but this was the first time she crossed over into the realm of an outright lie. Obsessing over it gave her a massive headache. She took some aspirin, but it didn’t help at all. Valerie knew at some point the truth would come out, and when it did there would be hell to pay.

She had not wanted things to turn out this way. She wanted to be the kind of mother who was close to her daughters. Maybe not best friends, but certainly a trusted, respected confidant on whom they could rely. Being that sort of person was next to impossible now that they had asked about Tony Ortega. As much as she hated to dredge up the past, Valerie knew she didn’t have much choice. Hayley and Taylor were like dogs with a bone. They wouldn’t give up until they found some answers, just like when their grandfather had fallen at the care facility.

“I need to make a phone call,” Valerie said to an assistant nurse named Jade.

“Okay, but be fast because I’m supposed to go on break in like five minutes. State law, you know.”

Valerie made a note to herself that if Jade ever needed something, she’d make sure her request aligned with state law.

It was easy enough to find the phone number she needed. Valerie logged on to the hospital computer and retrieved it from the emergency contact file for Maria Ortega, Tony’s sister. She became a PSH patient after her brother was incarcerated. Valerie hurried from her office down the hall toward the staff lounge, which, thank goodness, was empty. A box of dried-up day-old donuts sat on a table next to a quarter jar that begged for coffee donations.

She sat on the slipcovered black sofa, positioned her phone, and dialed. A man answered on the second ring.

Valerie took a gulp of air. “Tony,” she said. “It’s Valerie Fitzpatrick Ryan.”

“Valerie!” the man said, his voice full of exuberance. “Is it really you?”

“I’m afraid it is,” she said.

Just then, Jade poked her head into the staff room and pointed to her watch.

Valerie shook her head and mouthed, “Two more minutes!”

“Valerie?” Tony asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m here.”

“Is something the matter? Are you all right? I’ve hoped against hope that we’d talk again someday. And now, after all these years, you are calling me.”

“I’m not calling to get reacquainted . . .” she said. “You know that I care about you, but this isn’t a social call. This is a warning.”

“A warning? What do you mean, ‘warning’?” Tony asked. “I don’t like the sound of that at all.”

“I’m sorry. But I need your help.”

“Anything.”

“If I know my daughters—”

“You have daughters?” he asked.

Valerie thought for a minute. “I do. Twins. Like I was saying, I think my daughters are going to try to find you. I need you to keep our secret safe. Please.”

“What you did was a good thing, Valerie.”

“I know,” she said. “I don’t doubt that. But I’ve never felt completely right about . . . you know, about parts of it. I’ve never told my family any of it. Nothing.”

The line went quiet for a beat. “What makes you think they will come to me?” he asked.

“Two reasons,” she said. “They found some old news articles about what happened and, more importantly, because I told them not to.”

“They don’t listen to you?”

Valerie looked expectantly toward the door, sure that Jade, like a bad penny, would come back around any second. She didn’t know how to answer Tony.

“Not really,” she finally said, before correcting herself. “I mean, not all the time. I guess they are a little too much like me.”

“Meaning?”

“Let’s just leave it at that, Tony. Please, don’t tell them anything.”

Valerie put down the phone and exhaled. She wasn’t sure if she’d made things better or worse for herself. She just wasn’t ready to tell her girls the truth. She hoped that she would never have to.

Chapter 29

TONY ORTEGA HUNG UP THE RECEIVER of the lemon-yellow wall-mounted kitchen phone. If Valerie Ryan was imagining the young man she once knew, then she had forgotten to allow for the passage of time. Tony Ortega’s blue-black hair was no longer thick and glossy, but thin and gray. His eyebrows were matching gray caterpillars. His hands bore the calluses of decades of hard work—first on the docks in Seattle and then later as a night custodian at South Seattle Community College.

His life was small by many measures. He had a cottage in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods and a job that never could have been called a career. Yet he felt that he was a blessed man.

His wife, Suzie, looked up from her Sudoku puzzle. “Are you all right? What was that all about? It seemed like an important conversation. Definitely not someone trying to sell us vinyl siding.”

“I’m okay,” Tony said, his voice a little unsteady.

“Really?” Suzie cocked her head, looking into her husband’s deepset brown eyes. She pulled a pair of golden cat’s-eye glasses off her nose and continued to study Tony’s craggily handsome face, trying to place his expression. She knew her husband of fifteen years quite well.

“You don’t look all right,” she added. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Tony walked across the room to the TV and turned off ESPN, his choice of background noise while he read and Suzie played her game. He surveyed the tidy living room, the photos of his stepchildren, and their graduation tassels from high school and college. Tony had hung them on a thin wire strung between two bolts mounted to the wall. He knew that what had just happened—and what was about to occur—was life-changing.

“In a way,” he said, kneeling next to his wife, “I just did.”

She put out her hands and held his face. “Tell me, Baby.”

Tony nodded. He held his breath a moment before speaking. He’d never told Suzie exactly how he had been spared execution and freed from prison. She had heard the framework of the story, of course, and that he had been accused—and found guilty—of killing his father and mother to protect his sister. Suzie loved him for the man that she knew he was. He was good. He was honest. She was sure that Tony had never hurt anyone. She didn’t know and hadn’t asked how he had managed to slip through the legal system. Suzie was just glad that he had.

Tony’s phone call, though, seemed to change their status quo. Even sitting in a wheelchair, Suzie could have sworn she felt the ground shift beneath her.

“I told you about the warden’s daughter,” Tony said tentatively, watching the reaction in her gray eyes. “Remember Valerie?”

She nodded. “Yes, of course. The girl was lost and then she was found. It was a miracle.”

“Yes, it was a miracle,” Tony said. “But it was so much more than that.”

As her husband recounted for the very first time what had happened over those two days when the warden’s daughter was missing, Suzie Ortega folded her hands and knew in the bottom of her soul that the miracle was not Valerie being found but what Valerie did for her husband.