“I promise.”
Claire’s gaze sharpened as she heard that. She wrote something down.
The drive to Roanoke felt longer than the four hours from Charlotte. Mason followed the county vehicle in his black SUV, knuckles white on the steering wheel, rage and fear mixing into something almost adolescent in its helplessness.
At the intake center, he spent nine hours in waiting rooms, offices, and conference cubicles with bad coffee and fluorescent lighting. He learned the words emergency placement, temporary custody, interstate review, unverified identity, abandonment case. He learned that no missing persons report matched. No birth certificates surfaced. No hospital records fit. No adult had yet come forward.
He also learned that the system, while not malicious, was built to distrust sudden attachment from wealthy men who appeared out of nowhere with expensive watches and intense promises.
By evening he had retained the best family attorney in western Virginia and set two private investigators to work.
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