PART 2
I couldn’t feel my hands. The obituary shook between my fingers like it was alive. “That’s… that’s my fiancé,” I said, and my voice sounded wrong, thin and far away. “He’s not— he’s not dead. He lives in California. His name is Ryan Keller.”
The woman—Evan’s mother, I realized with a cold lurch—pressed her palm to her mouth. Tears slipped down her cheeks, but her expression wasn’t relief. It was fear. Pure, immediate fear. “Please,” she whispered, looking past me as if someone might be standing on the sidewalk with a gun. “Don’t say that name in the open. Come inside.”
I stepped over the threshold into an entryway that smelled faintly of bleach and stale coffee. The living room was neat to the point of obsession, like they were keeping the house ready for an inspection. Family photos lined the mantle, but several frames were turned face-down.
Evan’s father motioned for me to sit on the edge of a couch. He didn’t sit. He paced in short, clipped lines. “We didn’t put that in the paper because we wanted to,” he said. “We had to. The police told us to. There was a fire, and then there wasn’t enough left to—” He swallowed hard. “He was missing. They said… presumed dead.”
I stared at the obituary again. The photo was undeniably Ryan: the same sharp cheekbones, the same half-dimple on the left, the same eyes that always looked like they were considering a joke no one else was in on. “What happened?” I asked. “Five years ago, you said?”
The mother nodded quickly. “Evan was seventeen. Smart. Charming. He could talk anyone into anything.” She wrung her hands together. “He got into trouble, and we didn’t understand how deep it was until—”
Her husband stopped pacing and faced me. “Until the fire.”
I waited, barely breathing. “It was late,” he said. “We woke up to smoke. Evan’s room was on the back side. We tried to get to him, but the hallway was—” His voice cracked. He wiped a hand over his face, furious at himself for showing emotion. “The firefighters said it started near the electrical panel. But later… later they told us they couldn’t rule out accelerants.”
My stomach turned. “Are you saying—”
“I’m saying,” he cut in, “that after the fire, people started calling. Men we didn’t know. They asked for Evan. They said he owed money. They showed up at the house.”
The mother’s eyes flicked to the windows. Even now, years later, she looked like she was listening for a car door slam outside. “They threatened us,” she said. “They wanted whatever Evan had. Whatever he’d taken. We told the police everything, and then the police told us to stop answering the door and to move if we could.”
Evan’s father blew out a breath. “We changed our numbers. We changed locks. We tried to rebuild. And then we got a call from a detective who said there was a lead—something about Evan using a fake name. Then… nothing. It all went quiet.”
He leaned toward me, eyes sharp. “So tell me why you’re here saying he’s alive.”
I thought about Ryan’s tidy stories. The way he spoke about childhood like it was a summary on a resume. The way he refused to have his picture posted publicly. The way he got tense when I mentioned background checks for the venue’s security, as if I’d joked about bringing a bomb. “I don’t know,” I said, and it was the truth. “He told me his parents weren’t in the picture. He told me you wouldn’t come to the wedding.”
Evan’s mother let out a small, broken sound. “Wedding,” she repeated. “Oh God.”
Evan’s father didn’t look shocked anymore. He looked angry—like he’d been holding it in for years and my presence finally gave it somewhere to land. “Listen,” he said, voice low and urgent. “If that’s Evan, you need to leave him.”
My throat tightened. “You don’t understand. I love him.”
He slammed his palm against the wall, not hard enough to damage it, but hard enough to make me flinch. “You don’t love him. You love a story he sold you.”
Evan’s mother reached for a photo album on the coffee table and opened it with trembling fingers. She flipped to a page of school pictures, then birthday snapshots. Evan at ten, grinning with frosting on his nose. Evan at fourteen, holding a certificate. Evan at sixteen, standing in the same posture Ryan used when he wanted to seem casual.
Then she turned the page and my chest went tight.
A boy about eight years old stood beside Evan, arm slung around his waist. Same sandy hair, same wide smile. “Who is that?” I asked, already knowing I wouldn’t like the answer.
“Our younger son,” she said, voice shaking. “Caleb.”
I waited.
Her eyes filled again. “Caleb died in the fire too.”
The room tilted. “I’m sorry,” I whispered automatically, but the words felt useless.
Evan’s father stared at me like he was trying to decide whether to trust me with what came next. “The detective told us something a year later,” he said slowly. “Off the record. He said the fire scene didn’t just look like an accident. He said Evan had been mixing with a group that ran scams—identity stuff. He said they suspected Evan might have disappeared on purpose.”
My mouth went dry. “So you think—”
“I think,” he said, each word like a nail, “that my son may have set our house on fire to erase himself. And Caleb—” His jaw clenched. “Caleb didn’t deserve to die so Evan could become someone else.”
I couldn’t make sense of it. Ryan—Evan—was attentive, generous, the kind of man who remembered my coffee order and texted my mom on her birthday. He cried during that movie about the dog. He built IKEA furniture without swearing. He had been, in every way that mattered to me, good.
And yet here was proof that he had been someone else, that someone else had supposedly died, and that a child had died with him.
My phone buzzed in my purse like a warning.
RYAN flashed on the screen.
I didn’t answer. My fingers wouldn’t cooperate.
Evan’s mother whispered, “He found you.”
The phone buzzed again, then again, relentless. A text followed:
Where are you?
Then:
Pick up.
Then:
Don’t make this a problem, Claire.
My blood went cold at the word problem—not because it was a threat I could prove, but because it sounded like the truth behind his sweetness.
Evan’s father nodded toward the back of the house. “There’s a spare room. If you need a minute. If you need to think.”
I stood, legs shaky, and followed the narrow hallway. In the spare room, the bed was made tight. A single cardboard box sat in the corner, half-open, like it had been packed in a hurry and never unpacked.
I stepped closer and looked inside.
There were documents—old school records, a birth certificate, a social security card.
All in the name Evan Whitaker.
And under them, face-up like it wanted to be found, was a driver’s license.
A California license.
Ryan’s face.
But the name printed beneath it was not Ryan Keller.
It was Evan Whitaker.
My stomach dropped so hard I thought I might actually vomit.
The front door thudded.
A car door slammed outside.
