What if Toby hadn’t chosen that poem just for the emotions it conveyed? What if the secrets and lies he’d written about himself went beyond his hidden adoption?
Why did Tobias Hawthorne have that seal?
Rebecca, Thea, and I gave Xander time with his father. The rest of us waited in the SUV. I had Oren pull around the block so that if the paparazzi showed up at the doughnut shop, they’d focus on my SUVs, not Isaiah’s garage. While we waited, my mind raced. William Blake. The Blake family seal. Revenge. Avenge. Vengeance. Avenger.
When Xander climbed into the SUV, he didn’t say a word about his father. “Hit me with all those thinky thoughts,” he told me.
I studied him for a moment. His brown eyes were steady and bright, so I obliged. “What Vincent Blake is doing now—kidnapping Toby, playing games with me—I don’t think any of that is really about a patent filed fifty years ago.” The patent number had told us who we were dealing with. We’d assumed that it also gave us motive, but we were wrong. “I think this is about Vincent Blake’s son.”
“The prodigal son,” Xander murmured. “Will Blake.”
A wasteful youth. Vincent Blake’s distinctive voice rang in my mind. Wandering the world—ungrateful. A benevolent father, ready to welcome him home. But if memory serves correctly, there were three characters in that story…
Everything pointed to the third person in this story being Tobias Hawthorne—and if that was the case, maybe Xander had it wrong. “What if Will isn’t the prodigal?” I said. “On the phone, Blake emphasized that there were three characters in the parable of the prodigal son. The father—”
“Vincent Blake,” Thea filled in.
I nodded. “The son who betrayed his family, took the money, and ran—what if that’s not Vincent Blake’s actual son? What if it’s a man he’d brought into the family fold? Young Tobias Hawthorne. Nan said that Blake’s son was younger at the time, fifteen when your grandfather would have been…” I did the math. “Twenty-four.”
“At fifteen, Vincent Blake’s son might not have been old enough to have one of those seals,” Xander said, thinking out loud, “but he was plenty old to witness the betrayal.”
My entire body felt alive and alert, horrified and entranced. “Witness the betrayal,” I echoed, “and wonder why his father let some nobody from nowhere get away with screwing him out of millions?”
That put Will Blake in the position of the son who had stayed—the good son, upset that the prodigal’s betrayal was rewarded instead of punished.
There are three characters in the parable of the prodigal son, are there not?
Avenge. Revenge. Vengeance. Avenger.
I always win in the end.
“The question is,” Xander said, “why did Toby leave a poem by a poet named William Blake hidden in his wing, way back when?”
“And what are the chances,” I added, one thought leaping to the forefront of my mind, “that Will did have one of the Blake family seals with him when he disappeared?”
If the seal in Tobias Hawthorne’s possession had belonged to Vincent Blake’s son…
It felt like we were barreling toward the edge of a cliff.
“How long ago did Will Blake go missing?” Rebecca wasn’t looking at any of us. Light from the window hit her hair. Her tone was throaty and intense.
I got out my phone and did a search. And then another. Eventually, I was sure: The last time that Vincent Blake had been publicly photographed with his son, Will had been in his early twenties. “Forty years ago?” I estimated. “Plus or minus. Rebecca—”
“Will is one nickname for William,” Rebecca said, sucking every last molecule of oxygen out of the car. “But another one is Liam.”
