Her father was concerned. An unplanned visit from him was highly irregular. They had an established, secure routine: Jack Webster would come into the city for his monthly visit to The Union Club. He would check-in at the front desk of the exclusive members-only establishment and ask for any messages from his “assistant.” If Emma had a rare unexpected conflict, she would leave a message saying his 4:00 p.m. meeting had been rescheduled. If all went according to plan, Jack would slip out a back exit and meet Emma at one of the bustling midtown delis they rotated through. This spontaneous visit was understandable, of course. He had spent more than a decade hiding her, turning Emily Webster into Emma Porter. Making sure she was safe.
Her abduction was still unexplained. The feds at first suspected kidnapping for ransom, but a demand never came. Then they explored the idea of revenge. Her father had grown his family fortune mainly as an investor in both fossil and alternative fuels. He had also served briefly as the U.S. Ambassador to Qatar until an illness forced him back to the States. It seemed farfetched to think that someone who ended up on the wrong end of an oil deal would target one of dozens, maybe hundreds, of investors, and he wasn’t in the Middle East long enough to make a diplomatic impact. So, revenge was back-burnered. The feds explored black market adoption and trafficking, but nothing panned out. The information was incomplete, but from what they gathered, the people who took her had simply taken her. Nobody seemed to know why.
Every enemy, business or personal, had been investigated down to the smallest detail. Nothing turned up. One thing was clear, however. A considerable amount of planning and expense had gone into the abduction. That’s why the danger was ongoing; someone had paid dearly for their treasure and apparently wasn’t willing to let it go. Someone wanted Emily Webster, specifically. That was the best explanation they could come up with as to why. What else could it be? What little information they were able to get in order to piece together this theory came from a partially fried hard drive found at the scene of her rescue—a rescue that had come about through little more than dumb luck.
An older woman in an upper-middle-class section of Baltimore had just watched a segment on her favorite television news magazine about terrorists and drug cartels smuggling contraband and weapons into the country in everyday items like coffee and sporting goods. It was then that she’d noticed two Middle Eastern men bringing stuffed animals into a neighboring home with no children in sight. The woman immediately suspected a terror plot involving explosive-filled teddy bears. After observing their behavior for two days through the lace curtains in her breakfast nook and using her birding binoculars, she’d determined their behavior to be quite suspicious and called her FBI-agent nephew. Now the nephew, on any other day, would have dismissed this as yet another cockamamie call from his eccentric relative, but it just so happened that on that day, he was involved in a manhunt for two bank robbery suspects who matched the descriptions his aunt gave. The subsequent stakeout and raid did not produce the agent’s bank robbers; it did, however, produce a violent member of a Russian syndicate, two Middle Eastern men, a damaged laptop, a smattering of recreational drugs, and Emily Webster.
The kidnappers were now all dead: one was killed in the rescue mission, and two others were stabbed in prison. The two prison murders confirmed the FBI’s suspicions that whoever had orchestrated the kidnapping wanted to silence any potential informants and had the means to do so. FBI analysts made note of carefully masked data searches about Emily Webster over the years, and a disturbing file that turned up four years ago that contained an age sequencing of her eight-year-old photo that was, thankfully, fairly inaccurate. Her father and the men assigned to her case were convinced that she had become, if not an obsession, a person of interest to someone who was not easily dismissed. It wasn’t a Helen of Troy scenario; the person or people involved were not launching troops to retake her, but it was clear someone was still putting out feelers.
After Emily was rescued, her father moved them to an estate in a remote part of Georgia and Emma Porter was born. It was her father’s own private-sector version of the Witness Protection Program and equally as effective as the federal system. She attended the local public school and spent her limited free time with Caroline, who lived nearby. She had become Emma’s best friend during the exile and even spent entire summers with Emma under the pretense of going to camp. Caroline was the daughter of her father’s closest friend, and they were the only outsiders who knew the truth. Emily Webster wasn’t officially dead, but she was missing: a cold case. Only her father, the FBI, Caroline’s family, and the person who’d masterminded her abduction knew she wasn’t dead or still a captive. Well, she was still a captive, but not in the way people might have thought. And in truth, she really didn’t think about it that way until she got older. It was simply her reality; she didn’t know anything else.
As time passed, however, Emma started to realize how trapped she really was, and the more tiny tastes of freedom she got—driving, travel, financial independence—the more she wanted. When she turned eighteen, she had a choice, and her father was prepared for her decision. She told him she would rather risk her fate and live a normal life. He reluctantly agreed, and with Caroline by her side and JT at her back, off she went to NYU.
In retrospect, “normal” may have been an exaggeration, but as far as Emma was concerned, it was close. She didn’t know if her decision had been a risky one. She didn’t really comprehend the threat because she had no memory of being taken the first time. She hadn’t known where she was, where she’d slept, what she’d eaten. She couldn’t picture the room or the people. Apart from that brief flash in Nathan’s closet, it was like her mind went from the moment before she was taken to the moment she was safe without skipping a beat.
It had happened when she was eight. Emily was walking with a nanny to the little seaside ice cream shop in Greenwich that Nathan had reminisced about. She had been wearing a blue sundress that tied at each shoulder and glittery flip-flops. She could remember finding a stick bug on the concrete and moving it to the grass. The nanny had grabbed her hand and pulled her back to the sidewalk. They rounded a corner, and a van pulled up—it was a big white van with writing on the side and a cartoon picture of a man in overalls with his hands on his hips smiling broadly. The door slid open with a metallic groan, and the nanny shoved Emily toward a skinny, smiling guy inside without a word. Emily remembered thinking the man smelled like a closet and had tattoos on his arms: a mermaid and a sword and other things. She remembered the fear. When the big door of the van slid shut, so did a door in her mind.
Her next memory was being in the back of a large SUV. Her father was holding her, and she was wrapped in a crinkly silver sheet and wearing a huge gray FBI T-shirt. She had been missing for one hundred and forty-three days.
Her mother had died from a drug overdose when Emily was three; she had never been a part of her life. Her mother was the wild child black sheep of a Palm Beach society family and had partied her way up the East Coast. Her father had been mesmerized by her—she was a free spirit and a beautiful one at that—but he hadn’t realized the depth of her darkness until after she had gotten pregnant. He married her out of obligation, kept her sober for the duration of the pregnancy, and tried to get her treatment. She left when Emily was two and was dead by her third birthday. It had been Emily and her father for as long as she could remember. Despite the lack of a mother, Emily had been an exuberant child: bright, happy, curious up until the day she had been abducted. She was never morose or despondent—with the exception of those times when Nathan had gone away. She was a generally cheerful child, but after the kidnapping, Emily was focused, studious, and private. Emily Webster had become a different person. She had become Emma Porter.
Her father was the best man she knew. He was kind and smart and encouraging. Emma knew his life had been filled with stress and paranoia for the last fifteen years, but he was resolute. He carried the burden of two unsolved mysteries: who had planned the original kidnapping, and who was the person who still seemed fixated on her? Her father’s sole focus was her safety. Emma loved him.
“Em....” Her father stared out the window, the sheer curtain in his hand pulled to the side.
“He doesn’t recognize me. He hasn’t seen me since I was eight.”
“You were striking then, and you’re more so now.”
“Dad, there’s not even a flicker of recognition.” Well, that wasn’t totally true, but she got the sense that the occasional glimmer she saw in his eyes wasn’t about the little girl who’d lived next door.
“He was an elite soldier, darling. He’s trained in ways you cannot imagine.”
“I can imagine.” She had been trained too. Her father chuckled.
“True.” He took out a handkerchief and rubbed it across his upper lip under his nose. “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure. And it’s only for six weeks.” She hoped it would last forever, but she wasn’t going to admit that to him, or to herself. “I’m just an annoying journalist to him, trying to get a break.”
“You and I both know that’s not the case.”
“Too far?”
“Just an inch.”
“Dad?”
“Hmm?” He was glancing out the window at a fire truck squeezing by.
“Something strange happened.” He blanched, and she spoke quickly to allay his panic. “A flashback, I think.”
His brow furrowed. “You’ve never had one before, correct?”
“Never. I remembered,” oh God, this was going to be hard, “a cage, and a man holding my hands when I poked them through the grate.” Her father looked desolate, so she hurried to the pertinent information. “I remembered a very small tattoo. Here.” She pinched the soft flesh between her thumb and index finger. “I think I could maybe even draw it.” She went to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, but he didn’t return the hug. He was normally very affectionate—surprisingly supportive and functional for a titan of industry—but he seemed paralyzed. “Daddy?”
“Have you called Neil?”
“I will tomorrow.” He was right. Her therapist should be the first one to know she’d recovered a memory. He put his arms around her then, like he had forgotten to do it.