Chapter 2 - THE DUPLEX IN FREMONT
The ambulance had beaten him there by three minutes.
When Griffin’s Aston Martin fishtailed onto North 35th Street, its tires hissing against the rain-slicked asphalt, the red and white emergency lights of the Medic One unit were already painting the peeling grey siding of the Fremont duplex in violent, rhythmic flashes.
Griffin didn't wait to park properly. He killed the engine, jumped the curb, and slammed the car into park three inches from a fire hydrant, leaving the driver’s door wide open as he sprinted up the wooden steps of the porch.
The front door was ajar.
Inside, the warm, bright light of a modest, cluttered living room spilled out over the threshold. Architectural drawings—blueprints of residential foundations and structural load-bearing walls—were scattered across a dark wood dining table. A half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich sat on a white ceramic plate beside a laptop that was still glowing with a CAD software interface.
In the center of the room, two paramedics were kneeling over a slender woman sprawled across the hardwood floor.
Her dark brown hair, streaked with lighter strands from the sun, was fanned out across the boards. Her face was unnaturally pale, pinched with exhaustion even in unconsciousness, wearing a faded linen shirt and grey sweatpants.
Sloan.
She looked smaller than he remembered. The fierce, brilliant architecture student who had once argued structural integrity with senior civil engineers was gone, replaced by a woman whose wrists were too thin, whose shoulders bore the unmistakable, crushing weight of a decade spent fighting the world alone.
“Sir, you need to step back,” a paramedic in a navy uniform said, holding up a hand as Griffin burst through the doorway.
“I’m family,” Griffin said. His voice wasn't loud, but it carried the absolute, terrifying authority of a man accustomed to having his commands executed instantly. He didn't look at the paramedic; his eyes were fixed entirely on Sloan’s face, tracing the familiar slope of her nose, the curve of her jaw, the faint scar near her left eyebrow from a childhood bicycle accident.
“Sir, vitals are dropping. BP is eighty over fifty. She’s tachycardic. We need to move her to Harborview immediately—”
Before the paramedic could finish, two small figures darted out from the hallway near the kitchen.
They were identical.
Eight years old, wearing matching oversized flannel pajama bottoms and faded yellow t-shirts with cartoon cats on the front. Their hair was a chaotic mass of dark brown curls, their eyes wide, dark, and rimmed with red from crying.
They stopped dead in their tracks when they saw Griffin standing in the doorway.
Griffin froze.
For a terrifying second, he felt as though he were looking into a mirror warped by time and gender. The way they stood—feet slightly apart, arms crossed defensively over their chests, chins tilted up with a stubborn, defensive pride—was a carbon copy of his own posture.
The girl on the left—Hazel, the one who had called him—clutched a small, worn stuffed rabbit under her arm. The girl on the right—Iris, presumably—had a smear of dried ink on her cheek and looked at him with a gaze so fiercely analytical that it felt like being X-rayed.
“Are you Griffin?” Iris asked. Her voice wasn't shaking like her sister’s had on the phone. It was steady, sharp, and unnervingly calm.
Griffin swallowed hard, his throat feeling as though it were lined with broken glass. He took two slow steps toward them, dropping to one knee so he was at eye level with the eight-year-olds.
Up close, the resemblance was staggering. It wasn't just the posture or the eyes; it was the tiny, precise details—the shape of the earlobes, the faint freckle on the bridge of the nose, the way their fingers curled when they were tense.
“Yes,” Griffin said, his voice cracking slightly on the syllable. “I’m Griffin.”
Hazel stared at him, her lower lip trembling. “You’re the one on Mom’s emergency contact. But you sound... you sound like the men on TV who own buildings.”
“I own a few buildings,” Griffin managed to say, a bitter, fragile ghost of a smile touching his lips. He reached out slowly, keeping his hands open and empty so they could see he meant no harm, and gently touched the edge of Hazel’s sleeve. “Are you okay? Did either of you get hurt when your mom fell?”
“No,” Iris answered for her sister. “We were upstairs. We heard the table hit the wall. Mom has been working for three days straight without sleeping. She said she had to finish the commercial bid for the Ballard waterfront project or we wouldn't have enough for rent next month.”
The words hit Griffin like a physical blow.
Rent.
Sloan Callaway, a woman with a master’s degree in architectural engineering from Cornell, a mind that could calculate load tolerances faster than most software programs, was stressing over rent in a drafty Fremont duplex while he sat in a forty-fourth-floor glass palace drinking twenty-year-old scotch and wondering why his life felt hollow.
“She won't have to worry about rent ever again,” Griffin muttered, his jaw clenching so hard a muscle ticked in his cheek.
The lead paramedic interrupted, standing up from Sloan’s side with a heavy-duty stretcher. “We’re rolling. Mr. Drake—if you’re family, you can ride in the jump seat of the rig, or follow us in your car. Harborview Medical Center. Neurological and cardiac workup.”
“I’m riding with her,” Griffin said instantly. He stood up, towering over the paramedics. He turned back to the twins. The two little girls were standing close together, holding hands so tightly their knuckles were white.
Griffin looked down at them. A tidal wave of panic, guilt, fury, and a fierce, suffocating protectiveness crashed over him, threatening to drown him right there on the hardwood floor.
“Listen to me,” Griffin said, dropping back down to one knee so he was eye-level with them again. He reached out and gently cupped Hazel’s small cheek with his thumb, marveling at how warm her skin was, how entirely real. “Your mom is going to be okay. I am going to make sure of it.”
“Are you coming back?” Iris asked, her dark eyes searching his face with an intelligence that was far too old for eight years old. “Are you going to disappear like the pictures in Mom’s shoe box?”
Griffin’s breath caught. “What pictures?”
“The ones in the blue box under Mom’s bed,” Hazel whispered, her eyes filling with fresh tears. “When she cries at night when she thinks we’re asleep, she looks at a picture of a man who looks just like you. But she always closes the box before we can ask.”
Griffin stood up slowly, the blood roaring in his ears.
Ten years.
She hadn't just hidden from him. She had kept his memory alive in the dark, crying over old photographs while she worked herself into the ground to keep their daughters fed in a rental duplex.
“I am not going anywhere,” Griffin said, his voice dropping into a vow so deep and absolute that it sounded like a curse. He looked at the two paramedics wheeling Sloan’s stretcher toward the front door. “Lock the front door behind us. My security detail will be here in two minutes to secure the house. You two are coming with me.”
May you like
“To the hospital?” Hazel asked.
“To the hospital,” Griffin said, extending a hand to each of them. Without a second thought, both little girls slid their small, warm fingers into his massive palms. “And after that... we’re going to have a very long conversation about your mother.”
