The Boys With Blue Pendants

Chapter 3 - What Emily Hid

Rachel demanded a DNA test.

Henry agreed immediately.

Ethan did not.

"No needles."

"It's only a cheek swab," Lucas explained gently.

Ethan looked suspiciously at the adults surrounding him.

"Why?"

Henry realized they had forgotten something important.

The boys did not know them.

To Ethan and Noah, these were wealthy strangers suddenly asking questions about their bodies and their dead mother.

Henry dismissed everyone except Lucas.

Then he sat across from the boys.

"Your biological mother may have been my daughter."

Ethan stared at him.

"No."

"I'm not saying it's certain."

"Our mom was Emily."

"Emily raised you. That doesn't make her less your mother."

Ethan stopped arguing.

Henry continued.

"My daughter disappeared before her twin sons were born."

Noah touched his pendant.

"Twins?"

Henry nodded.

Ethan and Noah looked at each other.

They were three years apart in appearance, mostly because Noah was smaller and often sick.

But Emily had always insisted they were the same age.

Ethan remembered something.

"Mom had a box."

Henry leaned forward.

"What box?"

"She told me not to open it unless something happened to her."

"Where is it?"

Ethan's face changed.

"Storage."

Emily had rented a tiny storage unit before her death.

Everything they could not carry remained there.

The next morning, Henry took the boys there.

Inside were old clothes, photographs, children's drawings, and one locked metal box.

Ethan knew the code.

Their birthday.

Inside was a letter.

For Ethan and Noah.

Ethan opened it with trembling hands.

Emily's handwriting covered six pages.

She wrote that ten years earlier she had worked as a nurse at a private maternity clinic.

A frightened pregnant woman named Sarah arrived under another name.

Sarah claimed someone was trying to take her babies.

She begged Emily not to call her family.

Hours after delivering twin boys, Sarah disappeared from the clinic.

But she did not leave voluntarily.

Emily had seen two men force her into a vehicle behind the building.

When Emily returned to the nursery, the babies were gone.

She reported it.

Her supervisor told her she was mistaken.

The next morning, two newborn boys appeared abandoned near Emily's apartment.

Both wore blue pendants.

Emily understood the message.

Take them.

Stay quiet.

Or they would disappear too.

Henry had to stop reading.

"She protected you."

Ethan looked at the letter.

"Then where is our real mom?"

Henry swallowed.

There was one final page.

Emily had written:

Sarah may still be alive. I saw her six years later. But she was with someone from the Caldwell family.

Henry slowly looked toward Rachel.

Because Rachel had been the only Caldwell family member who knew about Emily.