Chapter 5 - The Cabin in the Woods
That second message erased every doubt I'd been holding onto.
My son was alive. For six months I'd trained myself not to hope too hard in either direction. Now one single word filled every inch of my body.
Alive.
Police traced the burner number to a prepaid phone purchased that same morning. The signal bounced off a tower eighty miles north of us.
Reyes kept Caleb's hidden phone as evidence. I stayed frozen, staring at Hannah's photo on that dead screen.
"Why would he hide all this in a locker?" I asked.
"Insurance," Reyes said quietly. "He knew going to meet her alone could go wrong. So he made sure there was proof waiting, no matter what happened to him."
He'd also hidden the note under his bus seat — a second safety net nobody even knew to look for, until my son found a way to point me toward it.
Police pulled Victor's records. He'd moved constantly over the years, never staying anywhere long. Then they found something solid: his late mother had left him a small hunting cabin ninety miles north, tucked deep in the woods near Cedar Ridge.
Directly inside the range of that phone tower.
Police left immediately. I wasn't allowed to go with them.
Those three hours were worse than every one of the six months before them combined.
Then Reyes called.
"We found the cabin."
My heart stopped cold. "And?"
"It's empty."
I couldn't speak.
"But somebody was there recently. We found clothes — two sets, both teenagers."
Two. Caleb and Hannah.
Inside the cabin, police also found canned food stacked in a corner, two mattresses on the floor, locks bolted to the *outside* of two bedroom doors, and a notebook filled edge to edge with Victor's handwriting.
One sentence repeated itself over and over across the pages.
*THEY STOLE MY CHILDREN.*
That was the moment I finally understood. Victor hadn't taken my son for money, or revenge, or anything so simple. He believed Caleb belonged to him, body and soul — the exact same way he'd once believed I did.
A gas station receipt in the cabin led police thirty miles east. Security footage caught Victor buying groceries the evening before. Another camera further down the road caught his truck.
Police followed the trail through the night.
At 4:17 the next morning, my phone rang.
"Diane." Reyes's voice.
I couldn't breathe. "Tell me."
"We have Caleb."
A sound came out of me that I didn't recognize as my own voice.
"Alive?"
"Alive."
"And Hannah?"
"We have her too."
I went down onto my kitchen floor, phone still pressed to my ear, sobbing so hard I could barely hear him explain the rest.
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Victor had moved them into an abandoned farmhouse outside Millbrook shortly after Caleb got hold of that prepaid phone. Police had surrounded the property before dawn. Victor tried to run through the back field.
He didn't get far.
