I Will Find You

by Harlan Coben

I am serving the fifth year of a life sentence for murdering my own child. Spoiler alert: I didn’t do it.

I had been on the receiving end of a devastating blow when I found my son, Matthew, in his Marvel-Hero-themed pajamas that night. That blow had knocked me to my knees, and I couldn’t get up. Not then. Not now. Not ever.

Memory is often our most imaginative storyteller. So maybe, probably, I didn’t “sense” anything at all.

Matthew had not yet reached the age of three when he was murdered. No one, not even a loving parent, could guess what he would look like some five years later. Not for certain. There is a resemblance, that’s all. The boy looks like Matthew. Looks like. It’s a resemblance. Nothing more. A resemblance.

They’d both gone to Revere High School before being drafted. Philip grew up on the top floor of a three-family row house on Centennial Avenue. Lenny lived a block away on Dehon Street. Best friends. War buddies. Cops patrolling Revere Beach.

People say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. If that’s true, this man’s eyes flash NO VACANCY.

On a purely physical level, it was a nice grin, charming, the kind that opens doors and lowers inhibitions. It was also probably the last sight his victims saw.

“This food is simply awful,” he says. “Absolutely tasteless.” I can’t help myself. “As opposed to, say, human intestines?”

Back then, Revere Beach had been a blue-collar community right outside of Boston. It still was in most respects.

The taxi dropped Philip off in front of a familiar four-family home on Dehon Street. The dwelling was decaying brick. The front door was shedding faded-green paint.

Revere Beach had never been a glamour spot. Even in his youth, the threadbare mini-golf and rusty roller coaster and worn Skee-Ball machines and assorted boardwalk arcades had been on their last legs.

Memories always sting, don’t they? The good ones most of all.

His eyes still stared out, lifeless, the mouth still slightly open in some awful silent scream. But he saw what Sophie was trying to show him. A single tear track glistening off Lenny’s ashen skin.

“My God, what the hell happened to you?” I smile and deliver a line I never thought I would: “You should see the other guy.”

“He’s my nephew,” she replies, sitting up a little straighter. He’s. She said “he’s.” Present tense. Not “he was.” She believes it.

Grief rarely attacks from the front. It prefers to sneak up on you when you least expect it.

So why was the warden getting into his car? And who was the guy with him?

The man incarcerated in this hellhole wasn’t his best friend. His best friend was gone. He had been bludgeoned to death and left for dead with his son.

She was having breakfast at the Nesbitt Station Diner, an eatery inside two converted railcars with a menu only slightly shorter in word count than your average novel.

“My Wife Doesn’t Want Anything,” which was their way of supersizing your French fries order and throwing in two mozzarella sticks.

The diner’s clock had all number 5s on it, with the words NO DRINKING UNTIL AFTER FIVE across the face.

The world may eventually give Rachel another chance, but she wasn’t sure she deserved it. It had been two years since Catherine Tullo’s death at Rachel’s hands.

“An escape,” the waitress said. “They only blow that whistle when an inmate escapes.” Her cell phone buzzed. Rachel stepped away and put the phone to her ear. “Hello?” “I need your help,” David said.

“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

His constant yet inconsistent jittery movements had led to him being good-naturedly dubbed Twitch by his fellow federal officers.

All men, Gertrude believed, tended to have some sociopathic qualities coupled with a wonderful ability to self-justify any behavior.

It was left to Gertrude to raise Hayden, and she had done a poor job. She had not looked out for him. And he had suffered for it.

When the eight-year-old turned toward her, Gertrude’s gaze couldn’t help but land on the telltale port stain on the boy’s cheek.

“He also has poliosis.” “Poliosis?” She pointed to the middle of her head. “A white forelock. Dark black hair with a white streak right in the middle.” I freeze.

I run, I leap, I hit the next roof. Then the next. I’m not scared anymore. I don’t know why. I feel exhilarated. Run, leap, run, leap. I feel as though I can do this all night, like I’m freaking Spider-Man or something.

“You think I forgot?” Rachel didn’t know what to say. “Halloween Night. Your freshman year.”

But she also knew the way the world worked. You simply never know. You believe you are safe. You are certain that you considered every angle, thought about every possibility. But you didn’t. Not ever. The world doesn’t work that way. No one gets it right all the time.

Fifteen minutes later, I’m at the Bowdoin Street subway and on the Blue Line heading toward Revere Beach.

I want to hold back, stay upright and focused, to not give in to the emotion of the moment, but I don’t stand a chance. Not with Aunt Sophie. Not with an Aunt Sophie hug. I feel my knees buckle and maybe I let out a small cry, but this frail woman of towering strength holds me up.

He took me to Kelly’s for a roast beef sandwich and a shake on Saturdays for lunch.

“It’s so good to see you, Rachel,” he said. She held on to him another moment. “You too, Hayden.”

“Let’s go for a walk.” He doesn’t introduce himself, but I know who he is, and he knows I know.

looking more like an explosive device than a human. Even now, with the years shrinking him down, he still has that incendiary air about him.

When I was in school, his name was whispered in the same way a later generation of children would whisper “Voldemort.”

A hit man serving life at Briggs told me that real-life gangsters started talking like the gangsters in movies after those movies became popular, not the other way around. Life imitated art.

“You’re free to go,” he says to me. “My guys will fly you wherever you want.”

Hayden had discovered a few years ago that he had a son via a B-movie Italian actress he dated a few years back—a boy named Theo—and was now helping to raise and support him.

The image still visited her in her sleep, of course, but it popped up when she was awake too, an awful jack-in-the-box, startling her whenever she felt relaxed and at ease.

“It should have been me. I rescued you, Rachel. You should have been mine.”

It was then that David stepped out from behind the shrub. The two men just stared at one another. Then David said, “Where’s my son?”

And there’s Matthew. I freeze. The gun is in my hand. My son is staring up at me. Our eyes meet and the eyes are still my boy’s.

I take out my phone. “I was able to get into my old email address. Here. These emails are eight years old. When I found out Cheryl went to a fertility clinic, I took a paternity test. Two, in fact. Just to be sure. It confirms that I’m Matthew’s father.”

“Yes. I’m your father. He kidnapped you when you were three.”

My son is looking at me. Our eyes meet. He doesn’t turn away. He doesn’t blink. Neither do I. It is the purest moment of my life. My son and I. Together. And I know he gets it. I know he understands.

“So you and Rachel…?” she asks. “Early days,” I say.