Then I remembered Gabriel, the boy who had vanished when we were young. Rumors claimed he’d run away, but my mother had refused to discuss him for years. Now, with her final breath, she’d begged me not to abandon him.

I folded the citation carefully and slipped it into my pocket. Whatever my mother had hidden, those dates and payments suggested a secret she’d carried for years. I had promised her something without understanding what it meant. Now I needed to find Gabriel—and discover why my mother had been leaving food at the dump…