“He told you of his suspicions?” Chris asked.

“Not until after. He called me in the middle of the night after the car accident. He’d gotten you”—he nodded at Gianna—“to safety and he needed his own medical help. I left immediately. He begged me for silence, hoping the killers would accept his and your mother’s deaths as sufficient and leave you alone.”

“But . . . there was a body . . . it washed up on shore a few weeks later . . .” Her voice trailed off at the sad expression on her uncle’s face. “Who was he?” she whispered.

“I don’t know for certain. Just know that man died of natural causes and no one had claimed his body.”

“You placed him there?” she squeaked.

“Not me personally. But it was the last bit needed to take those men off your family’s trail.”

I’ve been pushed into a movie. A horror film.

This wasn’t her life.

“Where was my father all this time?”

Her uncle moved his gaze to look out the window at the gray skies and buildings. “He was never the same man after that night.”

“Who would be?” Chris pointed out.

Saul met his gaze. “No, I mean with his head injury. I got him to a different hospital than the one Gianna was taken to that night and checked him in under a false name. He almost didn’t survive.”

“But he walked several miles with me.”

“He did. And to this day I don’t know how he did it. It must have taken every ounce of his will and determination to get you to safety, because the man who called me that night was near death. He’d cracked his skull and suffered a horrible blow to his brain from the accident.”

“The car did go over the cliff, right? I remember the ocean and the rocks, and climbing back up to the road.”

“It did. The tide later covered the front end of the car. Your mother was dead on impact, your father said. He’d left the vehicle’s doors open before he left with you, hoping to confuse whoever had run him off the road. You probably wouldn’t have survived if you hadn’t been in the backseat.”

She closed her eyes. “I don’t remember how the accident happened. I remember the feeling of flying . . . of being weightless and hurtling through the dark and then an explosion of sound and being jerked against my seat belt. I think I must have been asleep in the back of the car and woken up as we went over the edge.” She put her hands over her ears as an echo of screams rang in her head.

Were they real? Or imagined?

“I stayed with you in the hospital,” Saul told her. “I had my closest assistant watching over your father in the other hospital. I was afraid to go near him, fearing I’d lead your mother’s killers to him. The press responded immediately to your story, and I was in the limelight every minute.”

“The other hospital didn’t wonder about the man with the head injury in their care?” Chris asked.

“I don’t think so. We checked him in under the name of a trusted friend of mine and used his medical insurance. His bills were paid, so they didn’t look too closely. It wasn’t like today where you have to show photo ID at every doctor’s appointment.

“Your father had a serious brain injury, Gianna. He wasn’t the same person when he could finally form a coherent thought.” Saul looked deadly serious. “There were months when he didn’t even remember that he had a daughter. Or a wife.”

Her heart cracked in half.

“He didn’t recognize me half the time. I swear an angel was sitting on his shoulder the night that he managed to get you to safety and call me, because he wasn’t capable of doing anything like that for the next year. He was lucky that the accident happened not far from my city. He’d been afraid to fly out to see me, worried they’d track his name if he bought tickets. He told me that he and your mother had argued about where to go. She didn’t want to involve me, but he’d thought I could help. Another hour of driving and you would have been in my home.”

A wet warmth touched her lips and she blinked hard, wiping the tears with the back of her hand.

“Richard’s never been the same. The official diagnosis was a TBI. A traumatic brain injury. All that did was slap a label on what he suffered. It offered no prognosis or glimpse of his path to health. Everyone suffers differently and many are never the same.”

“He didn’t know me?” Gianna asked softly.

“Some days he did. On those days he knew that he had to stay away from you. The one logical conclusion that he managed to maintain from the first day of the injury was that any interaction he had with you could lead to your death and his. That fact he always remembered. Even on the days he forgot how to tie his shoes, he knew he needed to stay hidden.”

Chris took her hand and squeezed it. She felt a subtle tremor shoot through his grip. How much of this story does he identify with?

“Where has he been living?”

“Here and there. He’s been in and out of a few rehabilitation centers for people with brain injuries. I made certain he was financially taken care of. He even managed to marry a woman for a few years down in Baja. It was good for him. He lived a very simple life by the ocean, and she helped take care of him. I thought he was getting much better, but she died about five years ago. He had a bit of a setback after her death, but he was able to function almost normally in society by then.”

“Did he visit you? At the house?”