When Caleb woke up, his head felt light, contrary to his expectations. The blanket he was carefully wrapped warmed him, as did the seat heating, which had been on a low setting for several hours to ensure his sleep was as comfortable as possible. After a brief period of disorientation, the boy finally remembered the events that had taken place before he drank the contents of the ampoule. He also realized that he was in a car. In all probability, it was in the Phaeton where Leonore had picked him up outside the hotel.

"Liz?" he whispered cautiously.

It was very quiet, and the car wasn't moving. Caleb couldn't hear any other voices, not even from a distance. His eyelids felt heavy, so he still hadn't opened his eyes. Instead, he concentrated entirely on his hearing. But it was only when he held his breath for a moment that he noticed the steady breathing sounds of another person who must be in his immediate vicinity.

"Is that you, Liz?" he asked again.

Only now did he finally open his eyes and realized that he was actually strapped in and wrapped up in the back seat of the Phaeton. To his relief, he finally saw Elizabeth, who was sitting right next to him.

"How long have we been asleep?" the captain breathed, opening her eyes as well.

"It's dark outside," Caleb realized and carefully straightened up in his seat.

He looked around. Apart from him and Elizabeth, no one else was in the car. It was too dark for him to see where they were, but he had no illusions about one thing: Leonore couldn't be far away.

"Why did you tell the judge we were lovers?" the teenager now wanted to know.

"Because otherwise, you might have told him the truth. And that could have had bad consequences. Sometimes, you have to lie to many people to protect individuals."

Elizabeth also looked around. It was dark and quiet, and there was no sign of Leonore. She carefully tried to open her car door, but as expected, it was electronically locked. "CJ, I have a confession to make," she began, stroking Caleb's hair affectionately. "I've been lying to you too. All the time."

xxx

Two years earlier, Elizabeth had approached Caleb for the first time to speak to him in private. Until then, she had only followed the boy's fate from afar for many years. As best she could, anyway. Information about the child's development was not readily available to the captain. Nevertheless, she had always kept up to date with Caleb's development.

"It was thirteen years ago," she had told the boy after introducing herself and identifying herself as a cop. "I was traveling in New Hampshire. A fire had apparently broken out in an apartment, and I was nearby. When the fire department broke down the door, I just ran after them. They were quite happy that a homicide detective happened to be nearby. But there was no fire, just something burning in a pot. But the resident was dead, a stroke."

Caleb had listened remarkably calmly and sympathetically at the time.

"The fire department then tried to resuscitate her. I went into the living room in the meantime. Well, and you were lying there."

"Me?" Caleb had asked, unsure.

"That's why I'm here today. To tell you the story of your origins."

It had taken Caleb a moment to process the new information. "I knew I was adopted. But I've never heard that story before."

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about." Elizabeth had looked at the student with great seriousness. "Under no circumstances should you tell anyone about this. I've done everything possible over the past thirteen years to ensure no one finds out who you are and where you live now. And I'm only telling you all this now because I think you have the right to know."

An average thirteen-year-old would undoubtedly have been overwhelmed by the situation. Caleb, on the other hand, had reacted calmly. "You mean there could have been some kind of crime behind it?"

"Frankly, yes. I suspect that you were in that apartment for a reason. No one reported you missing or asked the authorities about you. Nothing in the apartment indicated that there had ever been a baby there."

Caleb had gone pale, but there was no turning back for Elizabeth. So she continued. "I was sure you were in danger. A hastily abducted baby that no one was officially looking for. It had to be something criminal. Someone would inevitably be looking for you. But it could only mean disaster if they didn't do it officially through the authorities. That's why I told my colleagues a different version of the story. I claimed in Boston that I had found a much older girl. And the whole thing was supposedly in Connecticut, not New Hampshire. Just to be on the safe side."

Caleb had yet to quite understand. "Then why did you even tell your colleagues about it?"

"I made a lot of phone calls to all sorts of authorities after the case, and I was also very concerned about your case, so of course my colleagues heard about it and asked questions."

"And what happens now?" Caleb then asked.

"I don't know. You tell me."

The boy had smiled and winked at Elizabeth. "Well, it looks like you were my savior back then. I'd like to keep in touch with you."

Elizabeth had hesitated with a response, and Caleb had understood.

"Yeah, I know, it's all totally hush-hush," he'd added. "Then we'll just meet in a way that no one will know!"

xxx

"You didn't tell me the whole story back then, did you?" Caleb asked Elizabeth now, as the effects of the sleeping pills continued to wear off, and he and Elizabeth slowly regained their strength.

"No," the captain admitted meekly. "To protect you. But it looks like that's no longer necessary. Everything I wanted to protect you from all your life has now happened."

Caleb loosened his blanket a little to make it easier to move. "Of all the possible explanations, coincidence is always the least likely," he replied. "You happened to be in the neighborhood when a parentless baby was found in some apartment? Come on, Liz, that's nonsense."

"I knew you wouldn't buy it forever. But I always hoped that I could delay the moment of truth a little longer."

"I realized it back at the hotel," Caleb said. "It was like a lightning bolt that shot through my head."

"What did you realize?"

"Basically, it's all quite logical: it was too unlikely to be a coincidence, so it had to be intentional. You couldn't have foreseen the sudden death of this woman in her apartment, which means that although this story was convenient for you, it wasn't part of your plan. So, the plan did not foresee where I would be found by chance. It only planned for me to be found by chance. So, if that woman hadn't died back then, I would have been found somewhere else. So it was clear that only one person could have abandoned me: you! But why would you have done that? It is generally assumed that abandoning a child is always a bad thing. But since you are not evil, it must have been the other way around. I then remembered this story from religious education. The abandoned child in the wicker basket."

"Moses!" added Elizabeth.

"Exactly. Moses' mother also abandoned her child. But not because she meant him any harm. She had to hide it because otherwise, the Egyptians would have killed it. So, if my abandonment was not malicious but rather served the purpose of protecting me from something, then the question inevitably arises as to what? All the secrecy we kept for years was, logically speaking, total nonsense. According to your version of the story, I might have been in danger as a baby. But at my current age and after the adoption, no one would have been able to find me. Unless, and this is where it starts to get exciting, about you."

Elizabeth listened to Caleb's conclusion with growing appreciation.

"So if the person you've been trying to protect me from all these years would know that you've been hiding me and, therefore, could possibly try to find me by watching you and secretly following you, then that means you must have had something to do with that person personally. So it wasn't the great unknown you wanted to protect me from, but someone particular. So you knew exactly who you were hiding me from the whole time. So why did you suddenly contact me after so many years? If you were the only person in the world through whom I could be found, why didn't you stay away from me? There is only one sensible reason: because you couldn't! This leads to only one conclusion: who would be prepared to secretly travel around with a baby with the sole aim of abandoning it somewhere when the opportunity arose to save it from something bad? Who would do such an extraordinary thing?"

Caleb now looked at Elizabeth with a look that left no doubt that he already knew the answer.

"The child's mother!"

Even in the face of the unsettling circumstances, Caleb was happy. The deep love and affection he had felt for Elizabeth from the very first second had been unmistakable. Somehow, he now realized he had always suspected it. No other person had ever made him feel more secure and loved. Elizabeth herself was silent. Only a tear ran slowly down her cheek.

"And why," Caleb finished recounting what had flashed through his mind hours earlier in the hotel room, "should you have kept it from me for years that you were my mother?"

Elizabeth wiped the tear from her cheek and looked bashfully out the window. Finally, she said what Caleb had long since understood.

"Because then you would have asked me who your other parent was."