I set them aside. I'd think about what those meant later. Underneath the cards was about ten thousand dollars in cash, and a large, black velvet pouch. I pulled open the strings on the pouch and poured the contents into my hand, staring in amazement at the beautiful and brilliant stones. There were mostly diamonds, with a couple of sapphires and a shockingly red ruby. There was also a large square-cut emerald ring surrounded by diamonds, a diamond choker necklace, and another sapphire and diamond ring.

I couldn't believe what I was looking at. These had to be from the robbery. I needed to compare what I'd found to the inventory list in the police report. This didn't seem like everything, but what was now in my hand was probably worth millions of dollars.

And they'd been hidden away in a flower bed by my mother.

More realizations hit me. My mother had had these stones when I was a kid. She'd probably had them since the robbery, which happened before I was born. My mom was a thief, maybe a murderer. She was a criminal. Even if she'd done what she'd done in the heat of the moment, that was years ago. And all this time, she'd kept the stolen property. She must have sold some items off to buy this house and to build her life.

I wondered about Rachel. Had my mom been supporting Rachel, too? Had they split the stolen goods? Had they been in on it together?

Maybe that's who they were—thieves, criminals, con artists.

There certainly wasn't anything in my hand that led me to believe otherwise.

What the hell was I doing here?

I was risking my life for a woman who might have been good to me for a while but had disappeared without a trace, leaving me to be raised by a man who wasn't even my father. No wonder my dad had fallen apart when he'd realized the depth of her betrayal.

As I thought about my dad not being my biological father, I couldn't help but wonder about Ian Holden. Was Ian Holden my father?

The timing fit, but the description Rachel had given me of my bio dad being a dangerous man did not. Or maybe I didn't know Ian any better than anyone else.

Was it just a coincidence that he'd shown up in San Francisco a month before my mother was shot? Maybe he was the one who'd shot her. Or he was the one who'd hired someone to do it, to try to kill her, to grab me. He had money and connections. He worked at universities; he probably had access to plenty of students who could guide him onto the dark web or wherever people went to hire hitmen.

A buzzing in my pocket made me slip the stones back into the pouch as I grabbed my phone.

"Hello?" I said.