Free Long Time Lost by Chris Ewan

sense something behind it. There was a queasy turning in her stomach.
    ‘We know you’ve been looking, honey.’ Becca stepped closer. ‘We know what we’re asking you to give up.’
    ‘You were getting close,’ Hanson added.
    Kate felt the room begin to tilt and spin. They couldn’t know. Nobody did. She hadn’t told anyone about the search for her birth family – not even the police who’d hidden her before.
    ‘We’re sorry for you,’ Miller told her. ‘Truly. If there was any other option, we’d offer it to you, Kate. We understand how badly you want to find them.’
    She closed her eyes.
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘We’re careful. We know everything there is to know.’
    No, not everything, Kate thought. No one but her could know how much it hurt.
    Kate had been abandoned by her birth parents outside Cheltenham General Hospital when she was almost nine months old. Soon after, she was taken in by her foster parents, James and Caroline. When Kate turned five, they adopted her, and she grew up happy and privileged in the idyllic setting of their Cotswolds farm estate, but from the day they first told her the truth, shortly after her thirteenth birthday, she’d been plagued by questions about who her real parents might be and why they’d left her. Then, when her adoptive parents were killed in a small-plane crash two years back, she discovered that she’d been willed half their fortune.
    Suddenly, Kate was wealthy beyond all reason, but she was grief-struck and rootless. It was only in the past year that she’d summoned the courage to begin searching for her birth parents. Until recently, her attempts had proved fruitless. Then the specialist agency she’d hired had given her one fragment of information to hold on to. Kate had a brother who’d been left at the same time as her. His name was Richard and he was three years older than Kate. But Richard hadn’t been so fortunate. He’d grown up inside the care system, shuttled between a succession of foster parents and children’s homes until, at the age of sixteen, he became a blank. As far as the records were concerned, Richard simply ceased to exist.
    Where had he gone? What had become of him? Did he even remember Kate?
    She’d spent countless hours thinking about him, speculating about what he might be like, wondering if he knew of her existence, and if he didn’t, whether he somehow sensed her absence from his life, in the same way, she believed, she’d always known that a piece of her was lacking; a hole she couldn’t fill.
    Finding her parents had been one thing. There was always the possibility they wouldn’t want to meet with her if she tracked them down because they’d abandoned her once before. But Richard hadn’t made that choice. Neither of them had.
    She wanted so much to find him. She had ample money to throw at the problem, and yet a solution had so far eluded her. Now, she was being asked to walk away from the search before she had the answers she craved. She was being asked to walk away from Richard.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Miller said again.
    And damn if she wasn’t starting to cry.
    ‘You said I was getting close to finding them?’ She looked up at Hanson.
    ‘I think so, yes. To your brother, anyway.’
    ‘Well, that could be dangerous, couldn’t it? Connor Lane could get to him. He could threaten him to get to me.’
    ‘We don’t think that will happen,’ Miller told her.
    ‘Lane doesn’t know about Richard,’ Hanson put in. ‘I had to do some serious digging to find out myself. The agency you hired have a first-rate security system. But I’ll monitor the situation. If a crack appears, I’ll fill it. And you should know that I haven’t been able to locate your brother. I’ve tried. If I can’t find him, then Lane can’t either.’
    Becca put an arm around her and Hanson smiled awkwardly, looking very young all of a sudden. Kate blinked at Miller, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes.
    ‘Where will I