Jaxon shifted, pulling the blanket he sat on closer around his legs. “My mother was Mara Mirek. She died when I was small. The man she lived with afterward was not my father. When he threw me out last winter, I found an old box of her documents. There was my birth certificate. No father listed.” He paused, glancing up with uncertainty. “But there were photographs of her holding two infants. I always assumed one was me. Now I think they were both me and someone else.”
A cold prickle moved down Tobias’s spine. He remembered photos of his mother too. Photos she had kept in a floral album she never let anyone else touch. Two babies. One in her arms. One in a hospital cot beside her. August Rainer had told Tobias that one of the infants had died shortly after birth. That was all Tobias had ever known.
Jaxon continued in a low voice. “I tracked down people who once worked with her. At a diner near Midtown. They said she had been pregnant with twins before she left the city suddenly. They did not know what happened after that.”