Before I hit send, I added my phone number underneath my signature. I wiped my eyes and took a deep breath. I was still having trouble processing everything I’d been through but now I had this silver lining of a brother and father. If someone had told me when I first sent in the 23andMe kit that this is where I would have ended up, I would have thought they were insane. I laughed and rose to go downstairs. But before I made it through the door my phone rang. Well that was fast, I thought as I fumbled to answer the call. It was an unknown number and my excitement spiked.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi Liz, this is Agent Hannigan.’

I tried to tamp down my disappointment that it wasn’t Connor. Hopefully, this call would confirm whether or not Cris was involved so that I could have some level of closure. If he was completely innocent, I didn’t want to lose him and Rosie.

‘Oh hi. Thanks for getting back to me. Are there any updates on the case?’

‘Well, we’ve had a couple of days to go through the evidence we gathered from the cabin and have interviewed Addie and Zoey at length, so we’ve learned a lot. We were hoping you could meet with me and Agent Beck today? We’d like to give you an update in person and thank you for your role in saving Zoey and Addie. I have to say though, Liz, it was extremely dangerous, what you did going up there. I wish you had called us first so we could do a proper search rather than jeopardizing your safety.’

He took a deep breath, during which I felt the heat of shame flow across me. He was right, what I did was dangerous and I was lucky it hadn’t turned out worse.

‘But Beck and I are glad you made it out safely,’ he continued. ‘The cabin had not turned up in our investigation of Cris or Frank. We’d done a thorough property search on all our suspects but the cabin was never uncovered. When Rodrigo died, ownership was never officially transferred over to Frank and Cris, who technically inherited the cabin by default. It also appears that when Rodrigo bought the cabin back in the sixties some papers were never properly filed. Because of this error, the cabin never showed up in the Dominio family records when we did our initial search. I’m not sure we would have found it without your help.’ I relaxed a little as his tone turned from reprehensive to grateful. ‘Our office is in Westchester, if you don’t mind traveling here. It shouldn’t take long but since you were so involved in this case, and per the agreement we had about sharing information with you before it hits the media, we’d like to go over some details on what we’ve found.’