The engine started again.
But this time the drive wasn’t heading straight back to the mansion.
Robert had pulled into a quiet side street lined with eucalyptus trees and private driveways. The car was still running, but his mind was already racing. He glanced in the rear-view mirror at the boy in the back seat—eight years old, white shirt now buttoned again, hands folded in his lap like a tiny businessman trying to look brave. Matthew Harrison. Only son of a man worth more than half the country. Living in the biggest house on the most expensive street in Beverly Hills, yet he was hiding welts on his back like they were a secret he’d been carrying for years.
“Robert,” Matthew whispered, voice cracking on the name, “can you… can you keep this a secret? Please. I’m not supposed to tell.”
The driver’s jaw tightened. He had been driving this boy for three years. He had watched him go from a laughing, hyper kid to this quiet shadow who flinched at loud noises and never ran anymore. But the back—the back was new. The scars were fresh. Robert could still see them: crisscrossing lines, some weeping, some purple, like someone had taken a belt to that delicate skin for hours at a time.
He had seen it before. Not like this. Never like this.
He turned off the main road onto a narrow lane that dead-ended at an abandoned storage unit behind a closed auto shop. No houses. No cameras. Just trees and privacy.
“Matthew,” Robert said, voice low and steady, “I’m not taking you back there tonight. Not like this. We’re going to my house. My wife Maria will make hot chocolate. We’ll call your father together. But right now… I need to see the rest of it. Can you trust me?”
Matthew hesitated so long Robert thought he would say no. Then, in the smallest voice the driver had ever heard, he nodded.
They drove the three blocks in silence. Robert’s hands were white-knuckled on the wheel. His mind kept flashing back to the last time he’d seen Alexander Harrison leave the house at 7 p.m. sharp—late for a board meeting. Valerie Castle, the woman who was supposed to be his fiancée, the woman the newspapers called “the angel who volunteers at children’s hospitals,” had been waiting at the door with her perfect smile.
“Run along to bed, sweetheart,” she always said. “Daddy’s working.”
Daddy was always working.
By the time they pulled up to Robert’s modest two-story house in the next neighborhood, Matthew was trembling. His small body shook so hard his teeth chattered. Robert helped him inside, took off his shoes, and guided him upstairs to the spare room he used as an office. Maria was already there—his wife of twenty-five years, the woman who had raised three boys and still had room in her heart for a broken child.
