Dad crossed to one of the file boxes, pulled out a folder, and handed me a photo.
A university ID card.
David.
Fifteen years younger. Slightly longer hair. Same eyes. Same mouth. Same face I had kissed this morning before I buried his supposed father-in-law.
“Three months after Alexander died,” Dad said, “David disappeared. Withdrew from school. Cut ties with everyone. We assumed he’d gone underground with Marcus.”
“Where did he go?”
“Eastern Europe,” Carter said. “We’ve pieced together parts of it. Moscow. Prague. Budapest. Marcus still had connections from his military years. We believe he was training David.”
“Training him for what?”
“Not just combat,” Carter said. “Psychological conditioning. How to build a cover identity. How to infiltrate someone’s life. How to make them trust you completely.”
“For twelve years,” I whispered.
Dad nodded.
“Twelve years. And then, five years ago, you walked into that coffee shop on West Sixth.”
The memory hit me so hard I almost physically reeled.
The barista had mixed up my latte with someone else’s. David had been sitting nearby with a laptop open. He had smiled, offered to switch cups because mine was apparently his order, and we had laughed over the mistake for twenty minutes before he asked for my number.
It had felt like fate.
“That wasn’t an accident,” I said.
“Nothing about your relationship with David was an accident,” Dad said.
When I looked up, his face was ravaged by guilt.
“When you started dating, I ran a background check. David Miller, Austin native, commercial real estate, clean credit, no criminal record. It all looked legitimate. But it wasn’t. The identity was perfect. Birth certificate, Social Security number, job history. All real documents. All properly filed. But every piece of it had been manufactured.”
“When did you know?”
