“Things no child should ever have to survive. Her mother tried to protect her. Brendan put her in the hospital. Clare tried to stop him. He turned on her too. She ran with nothing.”
She swallowed once.
“Mr. George found her before Brendan did.”
That sentence did something to me I still struggle to describe. Because inside the fear and the confusion and the furious grief at being kept in the dark, there was suddenly pride. Fierce and painful and undeniable. George had done that. He had found a girl on the edge of disaster and moved her out of its path without telling anyone, without calling himself noble, without asking for credit.
Then Helena said, “There’s something else you need to see,” and led me inside.
George’s office was hidden behind a plain door in the back hallway. Locked, of course. Helena knew where he kept the key—in a false bottom under the kitchen junk drawer, of all places, which was such a George detail I nearly laughed and cried at once.