Page 51 of Morsel

I bristle. Then I remember this is all part of the plan.

“Something like that,” I say.

Craig nods. He believes me. He’s always thought I was kind of a slutty loser, so this fits with his previous idea of who I am.

“Tell us,” he says.

“You first.”

He leans back and crosses his arms over his chest.

“Mr. Shadowvale paid me a lot of money.”

“And what exactly did you do for him?”

“I built the websites.”

“What?”

“No one knew where he was getting the kids,” he says. “The only thing people knew was there was a website with kids who were from great backgrounds: genius-level IQ parents. Rich parents. These were babies who had been bred for greatness.”

“And you built a website that, what, highlighted this?”

“Oh, I built multiple websites,” Craig says. “This was ten years ago. All of the kids had already been adopted. Shadowvale wanted to make sure that if people had questions about the legitimacy of the adoption agency as the children grew that there was something in place.”

“So, what, you just built a fake site?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Fake pictures. Fake testimonials. Fake stories. Fake families. I wrote biographies of parents waiting to adopt, I wrote stories about kids who had been adopted. I did all of it. We made it look real.”

“And then what happened?”

“And then Shadowvale’s wife started to ask questions,” he says.

“What?”

“Megan,” Craig clarifies.

“What did Megan do?”

“Nothing. Not at first. She was talking to someone at a function when they mentioned how much they liked working with Edgar to adopt their kid.”

“And she didn’t know anything about the project?”

“Nope.”

“So she asked him?”

“Yep.”

“And what was his response?”

“He wanted everything scrubbed from the web,” Craig says. “Literally everything.”

I have to be honest. There’s a part of me that’s wildly shocked my brother did any of this, much less without ever getting caught.

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