Chapter 3 - The Watcher In The Trees
My father moved faster than I’d seen him move in years. He grabbed the rifle from the case above the refrigerator — the same one he’d used to take me deer hunting when I was twelve — and racked a shell into the chamber.
“Stay back,” he said, his voice tight with adrenaline. “Both of you. Get Leo into the basement. Now.”
“Dad, no,” I said, grabbing his arm. “If that’s who I think it is, shooting him will only make it worse. There will be more. You know there will.”
He hesitated. I saw the conflict in his eyes — the father who wanted to protect his family warring with the man who knew exactly what Victor Voss was capable of. He lowered the rifle, but only slightly.
“Call Tyler,” he said to my mother. “Tell him to get over here. Now. Don’t explain anything over the phone. Just tell him it’s an emergency.”
My mother’s hands were shaking so bad she could barely dial. She’d known Victor Voss too. Everyone in this county knew Victor Voss. He owned the car dealership, the construction company, half the commercial real estate in town. He was the biggest donor to the hospital, the church, the little league. To the outside world, he was a pillar of the community.
We knew better.
Tyler showed up twelve minutes later, his truck peeling into the driveway so fast gravel flew everywhere. He burst through the door, his face flushed, still in his work uniform from the fire station.
“What’s going on?” he demanded. “Mom sounded like she was dying on the phone. Is everyone okay?”
Then he saw Leo.
His eyes went wide. He looked from Leo to me, then back to Leo, and his mouth fell open.
“Emma?” he said. “Is that… is that your kid?”
Before I could answer, he took a step closer. His brow furrowed. He stared at Leo’s face like he was trying to solve a puzzle. And then — slowly, like a light going on in a dark room — he got it.
“Oh my God,” he whispered. “He looks just like —”
“Jacob,” I finished for him. “Yeah. He’s Jacob’s son.”
Tyler sat down hard on the nearest chair. He’d been Jacob’s best friend. They’d done everything together. Graduated together. Applied to the same colleges. Jacob’s death had broken him. I’d found him drunk in Jacob’s bedroom three days after the funeral, sobbing into his old letter jacket, saying it should’ve been him.
“Jacob’s alive?” he said, looking at my father. “You knew? All this time, you knew he was alive and you didn’t tell me?”
“I was protecting you,” my father said wearily. “The less you knew, the safer you were.”
“Protecting me?” Tyler stood up, his face red with anger. “I grieved him for ten years, Dad! Ten years! I visit his grave every Sunday! I bring flowers! I talk to him like he’s there! And you knew the whole time he was just — what? Living in Mexico or something, drinking margaritas while I mourned a stranger?”
“He didn’t have a choice, Tyler,” I said, stepping between them. “Neither did Dad. If Victor Voss had found out Jacob was alive, he would’ve killed everyone. Including you. Including me. Including Leo.”
Tyler ran his hands through his hair, pacing the kitchen. He was thirty now, a firefighter, married with a baby on the way. He’d built a whole life on top of that grief. And now it was all being pulled out from under him.
“Victor Voss,” he said, stopping. “This is about Voss? What does he have to do with anything?”
My father sighed. He looked older than his sixty-two years. Tired. Defeated.
“Everything,” he said. “Sit down, son. It’s a long story.”
For the next hour, we told him everything. The warehouse. The girls. Jacob seeing it all. The staged crash. Me getting pregnant. Running away. Raising Leo alone. The secret we’d all carried, each in our own way. Tyler didn’t interrupt once. He just sat there, his face getting darker and darker, his hands clenched into fists on the table.
When we finished, he stood up.
“I’m going to kill him,” he said quietly. “I’m going to find Victor Voss and I’m going to kill him with my bare hands.”
“No,” my father said. “You’re not. Because that’s exactly what he wants. He’s been waiting ten years for one of us to make a mistake. That man out in the trees tonight? That was his way of telling us he knows. He knows Emma’s back. He knows Leo exists. And pretty soon, he’s going to figure out who Leo’s father is. And then the real game begins.”
My mother, who’d been quiet this whole time, spoke up.
“Then we fight,” she said.
We all looked at her. She was sitting at the head of the table, her back straight, her eyes dry and hard. The fragile, crying woman from the entryway was gone. In her place was the woman who’d raised two stubborn kids, who’d run a household on nothing sometimes, who’d stood by her husband through everything even when she knew he was wrong.
“For ten years,” she said, “we’ve been running. Hiding. Keeping secrets. And look where it got us. Emma lost ten years with her family. Tyler lost ten years with his best friend. Leo grew up without a father, without grandparents, without anyone but his mom. And Victor Voss? He’s still out there. Still rich. Still powerful. Still doing God knows what to God knows who.”
She looked at each of us in turn.
“I’m done running,” she said. “If that man wants a war, we’ll give him one. But we do it together. This family has been torn apart by secrets long enough. No more. From this moment on, everything is out in the open. We tell each other everything. We protect each other. And when the time comes… we take him down. All of us. Together.”
Nobody argued.
That night, we made a plan.
Tyler would go to the fire station in the morning and start asking questions — quiet, off-the-record questions about Victor Voss, about the warehouse, about any strange shipments that had come through the port in the last year. He was well-liked in town; people talked to him.
My father would reach out to some old contacts from his warehouse days — men who’d also left Victor’s employ, men who might be willing to talk now that enough time had passed.
My mother would take Leo shopping in the morning, get him some new clothes, show him around town, keep him busy and out from underfoot while we worked. And keep an eye on him. Very close eye.
And me?
May you like
I had the hardest job of all.
I had to find Jacob.
