part 2 For a second, nobody moved.
For a second, nobody moved.
Not me.
Not the officers.
Not even the tattooed guy beside me, who suddenly didn’t look so confident anymore.
The man standing in front of me—tall, perfectly dressed, like he belonged in a completely different world—was still holding my name in his voice like he was testing it for truth.
“Are you Autumn Song?” he asked again, slower this time.
My throat tightened.
“Yes…” I said carefully. “I am.”
Something shifted in his expression immediately.
Not disbelief.
Recognition.
Like he had been carrying my name for a long time without knowing where to put it.
Behind him, the back door of the Rolls-Royce swung open again.
And the second brother jumped out.
Completely different energy.
No calm. No control.
Just raw, chaotic excitement.
“WAIT—hold on, hold on—” he shouted, pointing directly at me. “That’s her? THAT’S Autumn?”
The officers outside the precinct straightened instantly.
Even the tattooed guy next to me stopped breathing.
The second brother took two fast steps forward, then suddenly froze like he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
“She looks exactly like Mom…” he whispered.
That sentence hit me harder than anything else.
Because until that moment, I hadn’t realized I was even holding my breath.
The first brother—Wall Street voice, calm posture, unreadable eyes—looked at him sharply.
“Don’t overwhelm her.”
“I’m not overwhelming her,” the second one snapped back. “I’m emotionally reacting like a normal human being!”
Then he turned to me again, softer this time.
“Hi,” he said quickly. “I’m Julian.”
I blinked.
“I… I’m Autumn.”
He nodded like that confirmed something important.
“I know.”
The silence that followed felt strange.
Not empty.
Heavy.
Like something big had just been placed between us that none of us knew how to touch yet.
Then the third voice came.
From inside the car.
“Okay, I’m literally still streaming right now, so can someone explain why the internet is about to explode—”
A third man leaned out of the back seat holding a phone.
A livestream was running.
Comments scrolling so fast I couldn’t read them.
Millions of viewers.
His eyes lifted to me.
And for the first time, the confident energy he had online cracked completely.
“Oh,” he said quietly. “That’s actually her.”
Then he turned the phone slightly toward me.
“Guys…” he said into the stream, voice suddenly unstable. “I think I just found my sister.”
The chat exploded so fast it looked like static.
I took a small step backward.
My plastic tote bag suddenly felt heavier than anything I had ever carried in my life.
“I think…” I started slowly, “there might be a mistake.”
The Wall Street brother shook his head immediately.
“No mistake,” he said firmly. “We verified the records twice.”
Julian nodded.
“Three times.”
The streamer lowered his phone slightly, still filming, still stunned.
“Mom’s name is on the file,” he added quietly. “And so is yours.”
That sentence made my chest tighten.
“Mom…” I repeated. “So you know her?”
The Wall Street brother didn’t answer right away.
For the first time, he looked unsure.
Then he said carefully:
“We knew of her.”
Something about that phrasing made my stomach drop.
“Knew of her?” I echoed.
Julian glanced at the ground.
The streamer stopped streaming for a second.
And the police officers behind me suddenly looked uncomfortable again.
Like they knew something they hadn’t told me yet.
The tattooed guy from earlier muttered under his breath:
“Man… this just got weird as hell.”
I didn’t move.
I couldn’t.
Then I asked the question I had been carrying across the entire country.
“Where is my father?”
Silence.
Not one of them answered immediately.
The Wall Street brother exhaled slowly.
Then said:
“That’s… why we came ourselves.”
My fingers tightened around my plastic tote bag.
“What does that mean?”
Julian stepped slightly closer.
“Autumn,” he said gently, “your father didn’t just leave your mother.”
My heart started pounding.
“He disappeared.”
The streamer turned his phone off completely this time.
No more audience.
No more noise.
Just us.
And then the Wall Street brother finished the sentence that changed everything:
“And the last place he was seen alive… was with your mother.”
The world around me went completely still.
Even the sirens in the distance felt like they faded.
And for the first time since I arrived in the city…
I realized I hadn’t come here just to find my brothers.
I might have come here to find out what really happened to my father.