The Midwife's Confession

It took me a few minutes to pull myself together before I went upstairs. I stood quietly in the open doorway of Haley’s room. She had no clue I was there and she was Skyping with one of her cousins. I could see one of the twins—Madison or Mandy, I could never tell them apart—on her monitor. Madison or Mandy was laughing and talking. She held a boxy little Westland terrier in her arms and was making the dog wave at the camera with its paw. Bryan’s sister, Marilyn Collier, lived an hour away in Fredericksburg and she and her four girls had remained a big part of our lives in spite of Bryan’s absence. Haley loved her cousins and they loved her. Tears burned my eyes as I listened to her talking a mile a minute to Madison/Mandy. I hated spoiling the moment.

I knocked lightly on her open door.

“Whoops!” Haley quickly turned off the screen. She swiveled her chair to face me, all innocent green eyes. “I finished my math, Mom, so I was just Skyping for a minute with Mandy.”

I couldn’t have cared less if she was lying. Let her Skype. Let her do whatever she wanted.

“That’s okay,” I said, then sighed. “Dr. Jackson just called, honey. He said your blood count’s low.”

“Shit.”

“Don’t say shit.”

“You say it all the time.”

“Yeah, well, I shouldn’t.”

“I don’t want to go in, Mom.” Her eyes pleaded with me to let her stay home and my heart cracked in two.

“You’ve got to, honey. I’m sorry.”

She dragged herself to her feet. “This totally sucks.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“Does this mean I won’t be able to get chemo next week?”

I couldn’t tell if she was hoping she wouldn’t have to have chemo or if she was worried the weeks of chemo would have to be drawn out that much longer.

“It depends on how your blood work looks by then,” I said. “Get what you need and we’ll hit the road.”

She frowned at me, her hand gripping the arm of her chair. “Mom?” she said. “Don’t tell Dad, okay?”

Maybe another mother wouldn’t have understood, but I did. She was scared. It was her illness that had caused Bryan to turn tail years ago. Now they’d spent a healthy, happy few days together, and she was afraid of appearing sick to him again.

“He won’t leave, honey,” I said, and I walked out of her room, hoping against hope that I hadn’t just told her a lie.

17

Emerson

Wilmington, North Carolina

“My God,” Tara breathed. She grabbed the letter and read it through in silence.

I felt my heart beating in my ears. I touched the paper in her hands. “I don’t know what to do with this,” I said.

Tara looked up from the letter. “I can’t believe Noelle would do something like that,” she said.

I shook my head. “Neither can I. It seems impossible.”

“Here we go!” The waitress appeared at our table again, this time with my salad and Tara’s steak. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted your dressing on the side or on the salad,” she said as she set the plate in front of me.

“This is fine,” I said, looking at the little cup of dressing. I wasn’t going to eat the salad either way, so it didn’t matter. I just wanted her to put the food on the table and leave.

“Is there anything else I can get you right now?” she asked.

“No,” Tara said. “Thank you. We’re fine.”

The waitress walked away and Tara pushed her plate to the side of the table, her appetite apparently gone, as well. “Maybe this is why she stopped being a midwife,” she said.

Of course. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that.

“I feel like I didn’t know her,” I said. “I know I’ve said that a lot lately, but now I really, really feel that way. I don’t know whether to hate her for this or feel sorry for her that she was holding on to this hideous secret all these years.”

“Is there a chance this is…just not true?” Tara asked. “I mean, maybe she was writing a novel or…a short story or something and this was just a literary experiment.”

“I love that idea, Tara,” I said. “But do you really believe it?”

Tara gave a small shake of her head. “She killed a baby,” she said slowly, quietly, as if trying the words on for size. “Some poor woman didn’t even know that her baby died.”

“And that she was raising another woman’s child.”

“And this woman’s baby was kidnapped.” Tara held the letter in the air. “Do you think she might have written another email or letter to Anna?” she asked. “One that actually made it to her?”

“I’ve wondered that myself,” I said. “But wouldn’t we know? Wouldn’t it have come out? Wouldn’t there have been a monumental lawsuit?” I reached for my wineglass, but the room was beginning to spin and I lowered my hand to my lap.

“Did you find any documents in her house that might be related to a suit?” Tara asked.

“No, nothing like that,” I said.

“Maybe she did actually mail a letter, but made it anonymous so Anna couldn’t figure out who she was.”

I nodded. “It sounds like she was planning to make this letter anonymous,” I said. “She just talks about the ‘extraordinary parents’ to reassure her—Anna—that her daughter was being taken care of, not that she planned to reveal who they were. So I don’t think she was going to reveal who she is…who she was…either.”

“What did she mean about the article in the paper?” Tara asked.

“No idea,” I said.

“What does Ted say?”

“I haven’t told him.” Maybe I never would. I’d thought of telling no one at all, trying to forget what I knew, but I couldn’t live with the secret. I couldn’t live with it alone, anyway. “What do we do with this, Tara? Do we ignore it?”

“I don’t think we can,” Tara said.

“Oh, Tara, this is horrible! Ted didn’t even want me to bring the box of cards home, and I wish now that I’d listened to him. If I’d just thrown it away, I wouldn’t know any of this.”

“But you do know. We know.”

“I hate this,” I said. “If we go to the police…I don’t want a media frenzy. And Noelle…her legacy. All the good she’s done. She’ll be dragged through the mud.”

“Look.” Tara leaned back in the booth. “We have very, very slim evidence here. And maybe she was writing a short story, for all we know. I think the first thing we should do is try to figure out who Anna is. If we discover there really is an Anna and this looks like something that really happened, then we can figure out the next step.”

I felt both relief and guilt that I’d dragged her into this. “I’m sorry I told you, Tara. It’s the last thing you need right now, but I didn’t want to be alone with it.”

“You’re not alone with it, sweetie.”

“So—” I turned the letter to face me again, the words blurring a bit in my vision “—how do we try to figure out who Anna is? Noelle said she read an article about her in the paper, so we could…I don’t know. Check old newspapers, I guess?”

“Maybe the baby that died—” Tara shuddered as she said the word “—maybe that was the last baby Noelle delivered.”

I felt a chill. “I have her record books,” I said. Could I be that close to knowing whose baby Noelle had dropped?

The waitress neared our table and I could see her checking out the uneaten food. “How are you doing over here?” she asked.

“We’re fine,” I said, and Tara made a little whisking motion with her hand that said, Please leave us alone, as clearly as if she’d spoken the words.

“I can read the last entry in her record books,” I said once the waitress was gone. “If it was a girl, well…” I looked at Tara and shrugged.

“If it’s a girl,” Tara said, “then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

18

Noelle

UNC Wilmington

1988

Noelle was happier than she’d ever been in her life. Her classes and clinicals were going well and she loved her work as a Resident Assistant. The girls on her floor turned to her easily with their concerns, and it wasn’t unusual to find her sitting with a group of them on the floor at the end of the hall, chatting about their boyfriends or their professors or their relationships with one another. The gathering had the feel of a mini support group, a relaxed get-together with meat at its heart. Noelle made sure everyone felt welcome, though. She didn’t want her end-of-the-hall group to turn into a clique.

The other RAs thought she was overly involved with the students. “You should just be there in case they need something,” they said, but Noelle felt protective of her charges. She wanted to be their safe harbor. The night one of them nearly died of alcohol poisoning, she wept because she should have seen it coming. But she did recognize another student’s bulimia, intervening before it was too late, and she counseled yet another girl as she decided what to do about an unwanted pregnancy—even though she was privately heartbroken when the girl decided to have an abortion.

All in all, she loved her girls. The fact that she loved one of them more than the others was something she was learning to hide.

She’d gotten her emotions at least somewhat under control when it came to Emerson McGarrity, doing her best to treat her like all the other girls on her floor. If anyone noticed that she paid a little more attention to Emerson, that she lit up each time she saw her, that she questioned her more than the other girls about her adjustment to campus life, her classes, her family, no one said a word about it, at least not to her. She no longer needed Emerson to know their relationship. Being close to her, being a part of her life, was enough. It was clear that Emerson knew nothing about her mother’s teenage pregnancy, and clear that Noelle’s existence had been swept under the rug. Noelle made a conscious decision to leave it there forever. She wouldn’t hurt Emerson or her family, but one way or another, she would always be a part of her sister’s life. She wouldn’t lose her now that she’d found her.

She was coming to like Tara, too. Tara’s exuberance was a good counterbalance to Emerson’s gentle, calm nature and she was far deeper than Noelle had originally guessed. For most of Tara’s life, her mother had spent her time in and out of psychiatric hospitals. It was not something she talked about easily, and Noelle felt touched when she finally revealed that part of herself to her. Noelle came to see Tara’s love of theater as her escape from a childhood and adolescence that had been difficult to endure.

There was, however, one small, niggling problem in Noelle’s life: Sam Vincent.

Plenty of guys on campus were intrigued by Noelle, but Noelle herself had been drawn—seriously drawn—to only two men in her life. Sam was number three.

She met him the second week of school when she stopped by Tara and Emerson’s room to offer them a couple of granola bars. He was there alone because Tara and Emerson were baking cookies in the dorm kitchen, and he was stretched out on Tara’s neatly made bed, writing something in a notebook. He looked up and gave her a quick, easy smile and that was all it took. The smile slayed her. She felt her internal organs melt and her heart thumped as hard as it had the first time she’d walked into this same room and laid eyes on Emerson.

“You’re Sam,” she said, glancing at the long-haired guy in the picture on Tara’s dresser. This Sam looked different. The guy in the picture was a boy. The short-haired guy on the bed, a man. He was slender. Not overtly masculine; macho had never appealed to her. Thick, jet-black lashes framed his blue eyes, and his lips were full and a little pouty. It was only the broad cut of his chin that saved him from being too pretty.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m waiting for Tara. You live in the dorm?”

“I’m the RA. Noelle.”

“Oh, yeah.” He sat up a little straighter, his back against the wall. Setting his notebook on the bed beside him, he folded his arms across his chest. “Tara told me about you. She thinks you’re cool.”

Noelle smiled and sat down in Emerson’s desk chair. “I’m glad she thinks so. I like her, too.” She nodded toward the notebook. “What are you working on?”

“Journal.” He grinned with the tiniest hint of embarrassment as he lifted the notebook from the bed and set it on his thigh. His arms were very tan and dusted with dark hair. “Thought I’d give it a try,” he said. “You know, writing down my deepest, darkest thoughts.”

She loved the answer. What guy journaled? If she hadn’t already pinned him as a rarity, she did now.

They talked for a while about UNC and his plans for law school. He told her he’d known Tara since they were kids, although Noelle already knew that. Actually, nothing he told her was new; Tara talked about him all the time. Words passed between them, but they could have been any words at all. They could have been talking about the weather or what they’d had for dinner the night before. It wasn’t the words that were being communicated. Something deeper was going on. Noelle felt it and she knew in all those melting, hungry organs of her body that he felt it, too. The way he held her gaze. The way he couldn’t stop smiling at her no matter what he was saying.

She offered him one of the granola bars and watched his tanned, perfect fingers slit open the wrapper. He took a bite, then licked a crumb from his lips, his blue eyes back on her. She pictured him in her bed, both of them nude. He was between her legs, slipping inside her. She didn’t even try to erase the image from her mind. If he had not been Tara’s, she would have asked him flat out, “Do you want to make love?” because that was her style. Why mince words? And if he were not Tara’s he would say yes. But he was Tara’s and, deep in her heart, she knew he always would be.

19

Anna

Washington, D.C.

2010

There were few things I hated as much as having Haley under general anesthesia. For an hour or two or three, it was as though she was gone. I always tried to reassure myself that at least she was in no pain during the time she was out. Yet the goneness, the unreachableness, still scared me.

She’d received the transfusion a couple of days before and her red blood count had bounced back nicely, but now the surgeon was moving her port from one side of her sore chest to the other and aspirating her bone marrow at the same time. It was never ending, the torture they put her through. Haley’d been stoic when the surgeon told her his plans for today, but I had the feeling she would have chewed him out if Bryan hadn’t been present. She was on her good behavior around Bryan. I actually preferred her feisty side. I liked when she cussed out her doctors. Holding in her anger and frustration wasn’t a good thing. She wanted her Daddy to think she was a sweet girl, though—which she was most of the time, when she wasn’t loaded up on steroids and fighting for her life.

I didn’t think Haley totally grasped the implications of this bone marrow aspiration. They’d be looking at her MRD level. Minimum Residual Disease. If it was too high, it would mean the chemo was not doing the job and she’d need a bone marrow transplant. Going down that road terrified me. It would mean more grueling chemotherapy plus full-body radiation to destroy her immune system and all that simply to prepare her for the transplant itself. And of course a donor would have to be found. So if I’d been the praying type, I would have been praying for a very low MRD. Very, very low. Although it had required nearly two full years of treatment, chemo alone had taken care of the cancer when she was a toddler. I was hoping for the same outcome this time.

I made sure the staff had my cell number, then walked down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and to check in with my office. Bryan was on a job interview in Bethesda. He’d offered to cancel it when I told him about the surgery, but I encouraged him to go. I’m used to dealing with her alone, I nearly said, but caught myself. Now wasn’t the time to guilt-trip him.

I didn’t go straight back to the East Wing, but walked instead to the neonatal intensive care unit. It wasn’t the first time since Haley’s relapse that I’d found myself wandering through the halls of the NICU, even though they now had the babies safely tucked away in private rooms and I wasn’t able to see them as I could years ago. I was actually glad. I wanted those babies to be out of sight.

My work occasionally took me to hospitals, and I always wound up trying to see the babies. The tiniest babies got to me. All those wires and tubes. Those little rib cages pumping air in and out, every breath looking like an effort. They were so vulnerable. Their dependence on others to protect them always cut into me.

Why did I do that to myself? Why did I look? Why did I search the features of the babies, looking for one who resembled Lily? I sometimes felt as though I couldn’t leave. I needed to stand guard. The nurses couldn’t watch every baby every minute. Even here in the remodeled NICU at Children’s, I searched for evil intentions in the face of each person I saw. That’s when I knew it was time to walk away. I became the director of the Missing Children’s Bureau in part because of my own pain and my passion, but also because I’d been able to hold on to my sanity. That sanity allowed me to distance myself from my own ordeal so that I could be rational as I kept the bureau functioning. That’s why I had to walk away when I began to imagine someone—one of the nurses? A total stranger?—coming into the nursery, detaching one of those fragile, helpless infants from her tubes and wires and slipping out the door with her.

I’d opted for a home birth with Haley for that reason alone. I’d never been the home-birth type. I wasn’t one of those women who distrusted the medical system or worried about having an unnecessary C-section because my obstetrician wanted to get out on the golf course. But I knew I wanted to give birth to Haley surrounded by trusted friends, by a midwife whose references I’d grilled for hours and a doula I’d known forever.

My phone rang as I walked toward the oncology unit and I checked the caller ID. Haley’s surgeon. I stopped walking and pressed the button on my Bluetooth. “How is she?” I asked.

“She’s in recovery,” he said. “She did great.”

“I’ll be right there.”

I called Bryan as I started walking again. “She’s in recovery,” I said. I could hear a woman’s voice in the background. Laughter. Was he at a job interview or what? For a moment, I felt a profound stab of distrust. Then I reminded myself once more that he was back in the area for Haley, not for me. I had to remember that.

“How’d she do?” he asked.

“They said great.”

“I’ll be there in a couple of hours,” he said. “Is that okay?”

“That’s fine.” I heard the coldness in my voice.

“Can I bring you anything?”

“No, I’m good.” I walked faster as I neared the recovery room. “I just want to see her.”

In the recovery room, I slipped my hand into Haley’s. Her puffy little face was at peace for the moment. I sat down next to the bed and watched for the flutter of eyelids. The twitch of her flaky lips. Any sign that she was coming back to me. She’d had to have general anesthesia three times in the past couple of months and each time I worried she would not come back the same girl, that somehow the anesthesia would alter her. But Haley opened her eyes and I saw my brave daughter in her tired smile.

“Ta da,” she said.

I touched her cheek. “It went perfectly,” I said. “Just great.”

A nurse lowered the blue hospital gown a few inches to check the pink skin around the new port in Haley’s chest. “How’s your pain on a scale of one to—”

“Three,” Haley said before the nurse could finish the question.

“Three in Haley world is about a six in typical people world,” the nurse said. She knew my daughter. Everyone at the hospital knew her. They called her a “frequent flier,” one of those kids who returned to Children’s again and again.

“Whatever,” Haley said. She raised her eyes to mine. “Where’s Dad?”

“On his way.”

“Good,” she said, and the corners of her mouth curled up ever so slightly as she drifted back to sleep.

I was still sitting with her in her lime-green hospital room an hour later. She’d been awake off and on in the recovery room, but now she slept deeply and I let her. I sat on the sofa that converted to a double bed, doing a little work on my laptop. It was admin stuff, boring but necessary. Every few minutes, I’d stop and look at Haley’s face, her too-pale, too-rounded cheeks and the remnants of a rash on her neck from one of her medications. I’d tucked Fred into her arms, and his big brown plastic eyes stared into space. After a while, a nurse walked into the room. He was African-American, skinny as a toothpick and bespectacled, and I recognized him right away.

“Tom!”

“Hey, Ms. Knightly,” he said. “You remember me?”

“I do!” I stood and gave him a hug. Ten years earlier, Tom had been one of Haley’s nurses, a favorite of both of ours. He looked exactly the same. “I don’t believe you’re still here!” I said.

“Where am I going to go?” He laughed. “I’ve actually been out for the past few months taking care of some family business—” he rolled his eyes “—and when I came in this morning and saw Haley Hope Knightly on the board…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry she has to go through this again.”

“Me, too,” I said. I remembered him slipping one time long ago, talking about how he often saw kids come back to the oncology unit years after remission. Strange, the things you remembered. The things that could haunt you. He’d caught himself; I remembered that, too. He’d backpedaled, telling me that most kids did just fine and that he was sure Haley would be one of them.

I watched as he took Haley’s vital signs and adjusted one of the bags hanging from the IV pole. Then his gaze lit on the framed photograph of Haley and my nieces where it sat on the nightstand. He let out a whoop and picked it up.

“The cousins!” he said. “Look at them! All grown up.”

“You remember them?” I asked, surprised.

“How could I forget them? They’d come barrelin’ into the room like a flock of geese, chattering up a storm, looking more like quintuplets than sisters.”

“Quadruplets,” I corrected. “There were only four of them. Just seemed like more than that. One set of twins and another two just a couple of years apart.”

“I have to tell you, I hated the days they visited.” He laughed. “They’d come in all chaotic with their little-girl germs.”

“Haley loved it, though,” I said.

Tom pointed to the girl in the center of the photograph. “And this here in the middle is our Miss Haley.” The picture had been taken in the Outer Banks last summer. The redbrick Corolla lighthouse stood in the distance behind the girls who were posing like little vamps in their bathing suits. Madison and Mandy stood on the left. Megan and Melanie on the right. Each of them wore her hair in a dark ponytail slung over her shoulder. Haley stood out from her cousins with her lighter brown hair. Her lighter eyes. She’d been giggling so hard it had been a challenge to get her to hold still long enough for me to take the picture. Haley looked so incredibly healthy in the picture. No sign of the disease that had been planting its seeds in her body at that very moment. She’d insisted on bringing the picture to the hospital with her each time she came. I hadn’t wanted her to. What was it like for her to see that vibrant former version of herself every day?

“I hear her daddy’s with y’all this time,” Tom said. He’d set down the picture and was writing something in Haley’s chart.

All sorts of responses ran through my mind, but I decided to be charitable. “He is,” I said. “He was living in California, but he moved back here as soon as I told him Haley’d relapsed.”

“I remember the last time, how it was just you and her.” He finished writing and looked across Haley’s bed at me. “I don’t remember every single patient but I remember you and Haley real well, because even though she was just a kid, she was like a little adult. She took care of you as much as you took care of her.”

It might have seemed a weird thing to say except that it was so true. Haley always seemed to sense that there was something broken inside of me, even when I hid that broken ness from the rest of the world. She knew. When she got older and I told her about Lily, she finally understood. She seemed to feel the loss herself.

“You were a drug rep back then, right?” Tom asked.

“Uh-huh.” I closed my laptop. “I quit when Haley got sick.” My job had already been on the skids because I refused to travel once Haley was born and travel had been a major part of my work. All those trips to Wilmington. I’d once liked that city. Now I loathed it. “Bryan had just gotten out of the military and was working for IBM.”

“I don’t remember him at all,” Tom said.

“Well, he left right after she got sick. He couldn’t handle Haley’s illness.” On top of everything else, I thought.

“How long were you married?” Tom asked. I saw the ring on his finger. I couldn’t remember if he’d been married the last time or not.

“Six years.” In my mind I divided those years into three segments. There’d been two wonderful years when it was just the two of us. We lived on base at Fort Belvoir and I’d loved my job doing pharmacology sales. We’d been young, so much younger than we were now. Our relationship had an energy and a heat I could barely remember.

Then everything went south. Bryan was stationed in Somalia where he’d nearly gotten killed, Lily was born and I had a stroke and nearly died myself. A complete and utter nightmare. Bryan and I settled into a tense, suddenly loveless marriage and he went overseas again, happily I thought. I got pregnant with Haley unintentionally and against doctor’s orders on one of Bryan’s leaves, proof that birth control pills were not one hundred percent effective. Proof you could still make love when you felt dead inside. My pregnancy had all my health care workers in a tizzy, but my blood pressure behaved itself and I felt good and full of hope. For a year after Haley was born, there was a cautious joy in our house. Bryan left the military and took the job with IBM so he could stay closer to home. I remembered thinking he was guarding us, making up for not protecting us well enough the first time around. Our happiness was fragile and we were only beginning to trust it when Haley’s fevers began. Bryan’s retreat was so fast I didn’t see it coming. One minute he was there, the next he was gone. How he could leave Haley and me, cutting himself off from his child, was as unbelievable to me as it was unforgivable.

“He’s back now, though,” Tom said, “just when she needs him.”

I nodded. “You’re right,” I said, swallowing my anger. I would have to find a way to put the past aside.

I was back on my laptop twenty minutes later when Bryan walked into the room. He barely looked at me before heading straight to Haley’s bed. “How’s she doing?” He lightly touched her arm as he peered down at her face.

“She was asking for you when she first woke up,” I said.

“Really?” His glasses caught the sunlight from the big windows near Haley’s bed.

I couldn’t help it. I was touched by the emotion his voice carried in that one word. “Yeah,” I said. “So how did the interview go?”

He shrugged. “All right, I guess. Time will tell.”

I remembered the laughter in the background. I didn’t know why that bugged me so much. I’d been sitting with our unconscious daughter while he was laughing with some woman. So? I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted from him.

“When will they know her MRD level?” he asked.

“Probably not for a day or so.”

“You want to take a break? I can stay with her for a while?”

I looked at my sleeping daughter. If she’d been awake, I might have taken him up on the offer, but I couldn’t leave her when she looked so drained and weak. I’d let another defenseless child of mine out of my sight. I would never do it again.

The following evening, Jeff Jackson called with the results from Haley’s bone marrow aspiration. “The chemo’s not doing the job,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Shit.” I was in the cafeteria at Children’s catching up on email while Bryan stayed with Haley in her room. They’d been playing Bananagrams when I left them. I hadn’t expected the news so soon, and it was news I didn’t want to hear. “So we have to go forward with a transplant now?” I asked.

“We’ll start her on a maintenance level of chemo to hold her steady while we look for a donor. Her MRD’s higher than I’d like to see and we’ll have to move quickly to find a good match. I’ll have you meet with Doug Davis tomorrow. He’s head of the transplant team. He’ll fill you in on what it entails.”

“Will he test Bryan and me to see if we’re matches?” I asked. “Can we be tested right away?”

“I’ll let Doug go over all of that with you.”

“So—” I looked at my laptop screen without really seeing it “—is this ultimately good news or bad?”

“Neither,” he said. “It just is what it is.”

I loathed that expression. Imagine if I said it to the family of a missing child. Well, it just is what it is.

“I want a better answer than that,” I said.

He hesitated. “I wish it were more positive news,” he said finally. It was the best he could do. The most I could ask of him.

“All right.” I let him off the hook. I was alone in this. Then I thought of Bryan in the oncology unit, sitting with Haley. I thought of Haley’s new fondness for him. The affection in her voice when she talked about him. How attached she’d become to the very word Dad. I remembered Bryan from the day before when he’d shown up in Haley’s room after the surgery, how he walked directly to her bed. Touched her arm. And I thought maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t alone, after all.

20

Tara

Wilmington, North Carolina

I thought I was screaming. I woke up abruptly and bolted out of bed and only then did I realize it wasn’t my voice I was hearing but Grace’s. I raced down the hall to her room, imagining someone hurting her. I was ready to tear out the intruder’s eyes with my bare hands.

But she was alone. Sitting in her bed in the half-light from the moon, she was doubled over, her hands covering her ears, and by the time I reached her, her voice had grown so tiny and strangled sounding that I could barely hear it.

“Help, help,” she whimpered.

“Grace!” I wrapped my arms around her like a cocoon. “Sweetheart. It’s okay.” I rocked her and she settled against me. “A bad dream,” I said. “Just a bad dream.” I remembered this. I remembered her letting me hold her this way when she was little, and while I hated that she was frightened, I loved the feeling of holding her without her pushing me away. “What was it, honey?” I asked. “Do you want to tell me about it?” She always used to tell Sam her dreams. She’d pour them out to him and he’d listen so carefully, as if he’d treasure every detail forever.

I felt her shake her head beneath my chin. She clutched my arm, let go, clutched, let go, reminding me of the way she’d open and close her fist against my breast when she nursed as a baby.

“Was it about Daddy?” I asked, then bit my lip. She hated my probing.

“My fault Noelle died.” Her voice was so soft and muffled that I thought I’d heard her wrong.

“Your fault?” I asked. “Gracie, no! How could it possibly be your fault?”

She shook her head again.

“Tell me,” I said. “Why would you think that?”

She drew away from me, but only a little so that our bodies still touched. When I reached out to stroke her back she didn’t withdraw.

“The day she died, she sent me an email,” she said. “It was the kind she always sent, trying to guilt me into volunteering.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“And Cleve sent an email, too. I was writing back to him, telling him how annoying Noelle could be…saying all kinds of negative things about her. About her being a whack job and everything. And right after I hit send, I realized I’d sent it to her, not Cleve.”

“Oh, no.” I was glad it was dark enough that she couldn’t see my smile. I’d done that myself more than once. Who hadn’t? But I felt for Grace and I felt for Noelle being on the receiving end of an email like that from a girl she adored. “We all make that mistake at least—”

“Then she killed herself.” Grace cut me off. “Like a couple of hours—maybe a couple of minutes—after she got my email. She read these horrible things I said about her and then she killed herself.”

“No, Grace,” I said. “You can’t pin her suicide on yourself. Maybe she never even read your email, but even if she did, that’s not enough to send someone over the edge. Whatever was bothering Noelle was deep and had been going on for a long, long time.”

I’d had my own problems sleeping in the two days since Emerson showed me the letter she’d found. I could think of little else. I kept picturing a baby slipping out of Noelle’s grasp. When? Where? How horrible she must have felt! I kept trying unsuccessfully to wipe the image from my head. I wished I could tell Grace about it to ease her mind, but the secret needed to stay between Emerson and me for now. Maybe forever.

As usual, though, I couldn’t bear the silence and distance that began to open up between us again as she recovered from her dream.

“There are some things I know about Noelle,” I said, needing to fill the silence and keep her engaged with me. “There were some reasons for her depression that explain her suicide, honey, and trust me, they have nothing at all to do with you. This would have happened whether you’d sent that email or not.”

“What kind of things?” She looked at me almost suspiciously, her eyes glistening in the moonlight.

“I can’t talk about them yet. Emerson and I are trying to figure out the reasons Noelle was so down. We think something happened to…with Noelle a long time ago that—”

“Like she was molested or something?”

“No. Nothing like that.” I shouldn’t have said a word. There was a good possibility I would never be able to reveal what I knew about Noelle to Grace. “I don’t even know all the details, but I’m just telling you this to put your mind at ease. All you need to know is that you had absolutely nothing to do with what happened to Noelle. Okay?”

She gave a small nod as she lay down.

“You going to be able to go back to sleep?”

“I’m fine.” She settled down under the covers and turned on her side, facing the wall. My body felt chilled where she’d been close to me. I didn’t want to leave. I touched her shoulder. Rubbed it.

“You don’t work this afternoon, do you?” I asked.

“No. Tomorrow.”

“I can drive you home today, then.”

“Jenny’ll give me a ride.”

I hesitated. “I can tell you’re still upset,” I said. “You’re so much like your daddy, honey. You ruminate on things and it’s not good. Maybe tonight we could—”

“Mom!” She rolled onto her back, and although I couldn’t see her face well, I knew she was staring daggers at me. “I want to sleep!”

“Okay.” I smiled ruefully to myself. She’d given me an inch and I’d tried for a mile. I leaned over, kissed her cheek. “I love you,” I said. “Sleep tight.”

I had to fight the urge to check on Grace the next day to be sure she was okay after her rough night. That was both the benefit and the curse of teaching at your child’s school: access to her was way too easy. She wouldn’t appreciate my interference, though, and I actually went out of my way to avoid seeing her during the day.

When I walked into the house after school that afternoon, the message light was blinking on the kitchen phone. I punched in the pass code and lifted the receiver to my ear.

“Hi, Tara,” Ian said. Then he chuckled. “I have to tell you, I get a jolt every time I hear Sam’s outgoing message on your voice mail. It’s nice, though. Nice to hear his voice. So I’m just checking on you. Hope you and Grace are doing okay.”

I set down the phone.

Well.

I had honestly, completely, forgotten that Sam had recorded our outgoing message. Emerson mentioned it in the first few weeks after he died, but someone could have told me my house was purple back then and it would have sailed clear over my head. I guessed no one had had the nerve to mention it to me since. Except Ian, and he did it in a nice way.

I pulled my cell phone from my purse and dialed our home number. The phone on the counter rang four times while I bit my lip, waiting. Then the voice mail picked up.

“Hey, there!” Sam sounded like he was in the next room. “You’ve reached Sam, Tara and Grace and we hope you’ll leave us a message. Bye!”

I stared at the phone in my hand for a moment, then started to cry, hugging the phone to my heart. I sat on the stool next to the kitchen island and sobbed so hard my tears pooled on the granite. I’d thought I was done with this part of the grief—this sucking-down, soul-searing pain—but apparently not.

It took me twenty minutes to pull myself together. Then I looked at the phone again, with determination this time. I needed to change the message. The thing was, I had no idea how to do it.

I wondered, too, what Grace would say. I remembered her reaction when she walked into our bedroom to see that I’d packed all of Sam’s clothing in black trash bags marked for Goodwill. He’d been gone two weeks by then, and I’d felt an extraordinary need to get rid of the clothes he would never be able to wear again. I’d heard that some women hung on to their deceased husband’s clothing for years, but another piece of my heart chipped off when I saw those suits and shirts and khakis and tracksuits in the closet each morning.

“You’re erasing him!” Grace had screamed at me when she saw the bags. I’d tried to hold her—I’d wanted us to cry together—but she’d pushed me away and run to her room. I’d thought, Tomorrow she’ll talk to me, but now two hundred tomorrows had passed and she was as cut off from me as ever. Why had I gotten rid of Sam’s things so quickly? Was it normal? I’d thought it would help, not seeing his clothes in the closet each morning. I hadn’t thought about how hard it would be to see the emptiness in their place.

I picked up the phone and pushed a few buttons, trying to figure out how to change the message. Grace would probably not even notice, anyway. She never used the house line.

I was listening to the instructions when Grace walked into the kitchen. I jumped. I hadn’t realized that she’d beaten me home from school, and I hoped she hadn’t heard my breakdown. From the start, I’d felt the need to be strong for her. Now I turned the phone off quickly, not wanting to change the message in front of her.

“What are you doing?” She stood on the other side of the island, eyeing the phone with suspicion.

“I thought it was time I changed the outgoing message,” I admitted, “but I can’t remember how.”

“To take Dad’s voice off it, you mean.”

I tried to determine if there was an accusation in her words. “Yes,” I said. “I thought it was time.”

She looked at the phone in my hand instead of at me. “I guess.” She reached for the receiver. “I can do it if you want.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

She deftly hit a few buttons, then said, “Hi, this is Grace.” She held the phone out to me and I stared at it, not certain what she wanted me to do. She gave me a look that said, You are a dork, and pressed a button. “I’ll say, ‘This is Grace,’ and you just add, ‘And Tara,’ and then I’ll finish it. All right?”

“Yes. Good.” I moved closer to her, our heads touching. I could smell her shampoo. I was so lonely for that scent. It put a lump in my throat.

“Hi, this is Grace.”

“And Tara.”

“Leave us a message,” she said, and then she hung up. “There.”

“Thank you.” I smiled.

“Anytime.” She picked up an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter and turned toward the hallway. I wanted to grab her. Keep her in the kitchen with me. Were you able to get back to sleep after your nightmare last night? I wanted to ask her. Tell me about your day! Who’s your favorite teacher this quarter? Have you spoken to Cleve lately? But I forced myself to keep my mouth shut, because what just happened between us, insignificant though it seemed, felt like magic to me and I didn’t want to ruin it.

21

Anna

Washington, D.C.

Bryan and I sat across the desk from Doug Davis, the transplant specialist at Children’s, as he leafed through Haley’s thick file. He pulled out one of the sheets of paper, set it on the desk and tapped it with his finger. “I have the report on Haley’s bone marrow,” he said, “and unfortunately she has a cell type that’s a bit more challenging to match but certainly not impossible, so there’s no reason to be pessimistic.” He was looking directly at me. Did I look pessimistic? I was scared out of my wits. Was that the same thing?

It felt strange to be at Children’s without Haley. She was with Marilyn and the kids for a long weekend and I couldn’t wait to hear all about it tonight. I was glad she was having a getaway, but three days without her and I was in withdrawal. I missed my daughter. I hated that I’d have to bring her back to Children’s tomorrow for another dose of the maintenance chemo.

She’d called me that morning and I could tell she was having a blast with her cousins. They’d skated at an indoor rink, cheered at Megan’s soccer game, camped out in the backyard, went to the movies and hung out for hours at the mall. I wasn’t crazy about kids hanging out in malls, but I felt like cramming as much fun into Haley’s life right now as possible. If she wanted to hang out at the mall and she was safely with her herd of Collier cousins, well, then, damn it, let her.

“Can you test us today?” Bryan asked Dr. Davis. “I don’t understand why this isn’t being rushed. Why no one’s running in here right this second to swab our cheeks.”

Dr. Davis smiled. He was so young. I woke up one morning and all the doctors I dealt with were suddenly younger than me. “We’ll see if you’re compatible,” he said, “but parents are usually the last resort. They’re rarely a good match. Best, of course, is a sibling. Does Haley have any brothers or sisters?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but Bryan beat me to it. “We had another child.” He cleared his throat. Adjusted his glasses. “A girl,” he said. “She disappeared shortly after she was born. We don’t even know if she’s alive.”

His words rocked me. They were my words. The ones I usually said. The ones that made my throat tighten up every time I said them out loud. He hadn’t mentioned Lily once since his sudden appearance in Haley’s hospital room two months ago. Had I thought he’d forgotten our lost child? There was real sorrow in his voice. There was agony. I’d thought I was alone with that sorrow all these years.

“How tragic.” Dr. Davis took off his own glasses. “Both for that little girl and for Haley,” he said. “There’s a one in four chance that a sibling will match. When we get into the general population, it’s closer to one in twenty-five thousand.”

The sudden anger I felt at Bryan—at the world—surprised me, and I struggled to keep it in. If we hadn’t lost Lily, we’d have a one in four chance of saving Haley. It was that simple.

“She has cousins,” I said, wondering how cousins would fit into the confusing picture of who would be a compatible donor and who wouldn’t. “Four girls. They’re Bryan’s sister’s children.”

“We’ll test all of them,” he said. “But most likely we’ll be turning to the global donor database. If any of them are a possible match, they’ll be asked to give a blood sample. Donors are almost always found—” he nodded encouragingly “—it’s just a question of how quickly.”

I thought of all the stories I’d heard of people who died while waiting for a transplant. I remembered a little boy who’d been receiving treatment here at Children’s when Haley was a toddler and how they’d been unable to find a donor for him in time. I began to shiver as if I were freezing.

“We’ll keep Haley on the maintenance regimen until we find the donor,” Dr. Davis said. “The good news is that she’ll probably get some hair back.” He smiled. “At least for a while.”

“Why just for a while?” Bryan asked, and I realized he hadn’t seen her hair since she was a year old. Back then, it had been downy and nearly blond. As a twelve-year-old, she wore it in a messy ponytail, long tendrils of it coming out of the elastic band and falling around her face. She didn’t care what it looked like. I wanted her to reach the age of caring. I’d never really reached that age myself—I was still a low maintenance sort of woman, not even wearing makeup unless I had a speaking engagement. I didn’t care if she was like me or not. I just wanted her to have the chance to figure out what kind of woman she wanted to be.

“When we find a donor, we’ll begin preparing her for the transplant. She’ll have a couple of weeks of intense chemotherapy and radiation, and she’ll lose her hair again. After the transplant, she’ll have at least another month or longer in the hospital and about four months’ recovery at home.” He told us about the isolation area and the extreme hygiene measures we’d have to take in caring for Haley.

“Whew.” Bryan sounded as overwhelmed as I felt. Nothing the doctor was telling us was a surprise to me. I’d done my research. I’d seen other kids and their families on the unit go through this ordeal. But the reality of the situation was only now hitting home for me. Now it was Haley I pictured enduring the ordeal ahead of us.

Bryan and I were pretty quiet in the car on the drive back to Alexandria. We stopped in Old Town for lattes, carrying our cups to a bench on the waterfront. The day was spectacular. One of the white riverboats was docked to our left. It positively glowed in the sunlight and the Potomac River was a sheet of silver in front of us. Everything I experienced in that moment, I wanted for Haley. I wanted her to be able to see that riverboat. To take a ride in it. To sit on the bench and marvel at the silvery water. To taste a caramel latte. I couldn’t seem to see or smell or touch anything without desperately wanting her to be able to do the same.

Bryan and I sat in silence for a few minutes, taking in the view as we tried to digest everything we’d heard from Dr. Davis.

“I’m scared,” I admitted finally. “Even if they find a match, it seems like there are so many things that could go wrong.”

He didn’t say anything right away. He sipped his coffee and stared out at the water. I was about to prod him when he finally spoke.

“Listen,” he said, “I want you to know I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going to take off again.”

I supposed he was trying to reassure me, but instead his words pissed me off. “You’d better not,” I said. “Not after you’ve let Haley care about you again.”

“I won’t.”

I looked out at the water, getting my nerve up for what I was going to say next. “I was surprised when you mentioned Lily,” I said.

“Why? Did you think I could ever forget about her?”

“I frankly wondered.”

“Oh, Anna. Seriously?”

I turned on the bench to face him. “You ran off, Bryan,” I said. “You started a new life. You never talked about her. I mean, you talked to the police and the authorities back when it happened, but all these years, you’ve never talked to me about her.”

“It was such a difficult time.”

“‘Difficult’ doesn’t begin to describe it.”

He took off his sunglasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I have regrets,” he said.

And damn well you should, I thought. “Tell me your regrets.” I wanted an accounting. I wanted to make sure he didn’t miss any.

He looked at me as if deciding whether to take the bait.

“First and foremost, I regret not being a father to Haley,” he said. “There is no excuse for it other than cowardice. I wasn’t a good father to her from the start. I never let myself get close to her. I was afraid of getting close and then having her disappear the way Lily did. I know that was irrational, but it’s how I felt.”

I remembered how little he’d had to do with Haley during her first year. I’d thought it was normal. Babies and mothers were so attached to one another that I figured fathers didn’t quite know how to fit into the picture. I never realized it was fear that kept him from bonding with her.

“When she got sick—” he shook his head “—that was it. I had to escape. Gutless. I know.”

“You’re taking the risk of losing her now,” I said. “How come?”

“I think this is my personal brand of midlife crisis.” He smiled. “Some guys see life passing them by, going too quickly, and they fill the void with a hot car or a hot girlfriend. I saw life passing me by and felt the void, but I knew it wasn’t a car or a woman I needed. I knew what I was missing. My daughter.” He slipped his sunglasses back on. “I was trying to figure out how to gracefully come back into her life when you called. Then I knew it wouldn’t be graceful, but I had to do it. To be here for her. For you, too. Though it scared the shit out of me, Anna.” He looked at me. “It still does. But if anything happened to her and I didn’t make the effort to get to know her, I’d never forgive myself. There was already so much I couldn’t forgive myself for. I earned a medal for bravery in the army, but I was a coward when it came to my own family. I wanted to give that medal back.”

I was softening toward him. I believed him. “I’m glad you’re telling me all this,” I said. “It’s kind of late, but I’m still glad.”

“There’s something else,” he said. “I have a friend here. He and his wife own a car dealership in Maryland. When I told you I had a job interview last week, I was really over there talking to them.”

I remembered his call from the interview. The woman’s laughter in the background. I frowned, waiting, wondering where this was going.

“They had a child who died of leukemia many years ago. I told them about Haley before I came out here and they told me if she ended up needing a transplant, they wanted to sponsor a bone marrow drive for her. So that’s what I was talking to them about. Just in case she ended up needing it. And she does. So—”

“Wow.” I felt guilty for having doubted him. “Wow.”

“As I understand it, the possibility of finding a donor from the drive is slim,” he said, “but the point is, it puts more people into the pool. They told me if you and Haley are willing to go public with, you know, Haley’s story, it helps pull people in. But you don’t have to.”

I’d have to think about that. We—all three of us—had a pretty damn poignant story, given Lily’s disappearance and Haley’s first bout with leukemia. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to put my daughter on display.

“I’ll talk to her about it,” I said. “We can talk to her about it. Either way, thank you for thinking of this. For doing this.”

I watched a group of tourists line up to get on the riverboat. I was still amazed by the fact that Bryan had this whole donor drive up his sleeve. That he’d been thinking ahead.

“You know,” he said now, “the whole Lily thing… It took me a long time to figure it out for myself. I still…it’s still hard for me to talk about her. I know you were angry with me for not going to Wilmington to check on her back then. Believe me, I wish I had, but I couldn’t leave you. I thought Lily was safe, but that I could lose you at any minute. You were hanging between life and death.”

“I know,” I said. “I know what you did seemed to make sense at the time.” I still wished he had tried harder. Called the hospital in Wilmington sooner than he did. Pressed them harder for more information. Something. Yet he couldn’t have known that Lily had vanished. How could anyone have known?

“I felt like it was my fault she disappeared,” he said.

“I made you feel that way.” I had wanted him to apologize to me for everything, but I could suddenly see my own culpability. I’d blamed him because I didn’t know who else to blame. I’d been in a coma at Duke University Hospital when he’d been called back from Somalia and of course I’d been his main concern. Yet when I came out of the coma and we learned that Lily had somehow disappeared from the Wilmington hospital, I was furious with him for not going there to check on her. I froze him out. “We were screwed up, both of us,” I said. “We should have been getting some serious marriage counseling.”

“No kidding.” He smiled. “We should have had a counselor move in with us.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Have you ever…did you ever get any leads on what happened to her?” he asked.

I shook my head. “The investigators thought she died, as you know,” I said. “Maybe a medical mistake someone was trying to cover up, but I’ve never been able to accept that theory.” I didn’t want to accept that theory. “Then there were all sorts of dead ends. They called me one time when Haley was about three. A woman had contacted them from South Carolina to say she thought her cousin’s little girl was actually Lily. She said the cousin just appeared with a baby one day around the same time Lily was taken and this woman thought it was weird. The investigators asked why she’d waited so many years to call and she said she’d been afraid to get her cousin in trouble, but now she thought the cousin was abusing the girl so she was making the call. It turned out the cousin had kidnapped someone’s baby, just not mine. Not ours.” I could still feel the letdown when the investigator called me with the DNA results.

“I really got my hopes up, Bryan,” I said. “After Haley went into remission when she was nearly four and I could finally think about something other than getting her well, she and I went to Wilmington for a week. We just walked the streets, while I looked for a seven-year-old girl who might be Lily. I hung out around the schools. It was a little crazy of me, especially since the hospital she’d been in covered such a huge geographical area. Lily could have been anywhere. I’ve always clung to the hope that someone who desperately wanted a child saw the most beautiful baby in the hospital and took her. At least that way, she would have been wanted and cared for.”

“I never got to see her.” Bryan’s face was slack with sadness.

“I know,” I said. “At least I had her for a few hours.”

“Does Haley know about her?”

“Of course.” He was not used to openness. To hard truths. It had taken him two months to get up the courage to mention Lily. “I told her very early,” I said. “She couldn’t have been more than five or six. Bryan, she’s an unusual girl.”

“I know that,” he said with a smile. “She’s fantastic.”

“Maybe it was because she had to go through all the medical stuff when she was so small, I don’t know, but she’s always been different from other kids her age. She even helps me look for Lily.”

He looked startled. “What do you mean?”

“She knows the sort of work the Missing Children’s Bureau does. She goes through the leads we get, looking for anything that might be related to Lily. She hangs out at the office with me sometimes. She and I have gone back to Wilmington twice, looking for Lily. She and I share that gigantic hole in our hearts. She even has a website she made herself called ‘Sibs of the Missing.’”

“You’re kidding. She made it herself?”

I nodded. “She’s a computer geek, just like her father.”

He leaned his head back, looking up at the sky. “I love her,” he said. “All these years, I sent money and Christmas presents and all that, but I didn’t love her. I didn’t feel anything except guilt for being a shitty father. Now I love her and…I can honestly say I’ve never felt like this before. This kind of emotion. The moment I first saw her in the hospital room, bald and puking—” he looked at me, his smile both confused and tender “—I wanted to take her place,” he said. “Give her my health. Let me be the one sick in that bed.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I know that feeling.”

“I’m so pissed at myself.”

I didn’t want to hear any more regrets. The need to hear them, years in the making, had evaporated. “Let’s put the past behind us,” I said. “You’re here now. Now you’re earning that medal for bravery.”

22

Emerson

Wilmington, North Carolina

Hot!’s kitchen was far cleaner than the one I had at home. That was because the health department never showed up at my house, but they could sashay into the café at any moment. We had a ninety-nine rating and I was aiming for a hundred, which was why I was making Jenny clean the ice machine and scour every inch of the countertop before I’d let her go for the evening.

“I’m going to the library straight from here, Jenny,” I said, checking the refrigerator to make sure we had enough half-and-half for the morning, “so there’s a container of leftover butternut squash chili in here for dinner tonight. Will you take it home and heat it up for you and Dad?”

Jenny looked up from the counter. “You’re not coming home for dinner?” She acted like I’d said I planned to fly to the moon, but I couldn’t blame her. Except for the occasional girls’ night out with Tara, I was always home for dinner. Tonight, though, I had other plans. Unfortunately, I needed to lie about them.

“I need to do some research on heirloom recipes I want to add to the lunch menu,” I said. “I can’t get to them on Google, but the library has access.” My vagueness paid off. Jenny’s eyes glazed over at the word research. It had worked with Ted, too, when I gave him the same story. I’d lost Ted with heirloom. I had the feeling this wouldn’t be the last lie I told my family for a while. Not until I had things figured out. “So is that okay with you?” I took off my apron and hung it from the hook near the rear door. “You’ll take care of dinner?”

“I guess.” She pumped the spray bottle in an arc across the counter and began rubbing. “But I wanted to talk to you about my job. I’d like to work fewer hours.”

I laughed. “Wouldn’t we all,” I said.

She didn’t look at me and I wondered if she expected me to give her grief about it. I honestly didn’t need her that much right now. My manager, Sandra, and my other waitress and one cook could take care of things most of the time. Jenny needed the money, though, and she was a big help on the days she worked.

“I’m serious.” She moved the toaster to clean behind it. I tried to remember the last time I’d moved our toaster at home. “I’m doing more of the babies stuff because of Noelle being—” she shrugged “—you know.”

“And you want more time with Devon.”

Jenny smiled down at the counter, red-cheeked and busted. “I don’t have much free time right now,” she said.

She was smitten by this guy. I was so caught up in my own life, I’d barely noticed what was going on in hers.

“Less hours means less money in your pocket,” I said, putting away the bowls that had been air-drying in the dish rack.

“I know.”

“You work out a new schedule with Sandra and we’ll see how it looks,” I said. Jenny was a good kid. She was so much like me. Easygoing, with plenty of friends. Maybe not the most ambitious person in the world, but frankly, I thought it was more important to be liked than to be successful. I knew you could find experts who would argue with that, but I didn’t care. I wanted to be liked. So sue me. Jenny seemed to be well-liked by every person—child or adult—who knew her. I’d rather raise a child like that than one who’d stab another person in the back to get ahead.

The few boys she’d dated all seemed like nice kids, too.

She hadn’t been serious with any of them—at least, not as far as I knew—and that had been fine. Maybe Devon was different. I liked when they went out as a foursome with Grace and Cleve over the summer. Safety in numbers, though maybe I was kidding myself about that.

“How’s Grace holding up?” I asked as I closed the cabinet door.

“You mean about Cleve?”

“It’s got to be hard for her since you’re still with Devon.”

“She’s…” Jenny shrugged. “She’s bummed. And Cleve is being a cretin.”

“Well, I can understand his feelings.” I took the chili out of the refrigerator, afraid she might forget it. “He probably wants to experience college and being away from home without being tied down.”

“It’s not that,” Jenny said. “I get that. It’s how he’s acting now. He constantly texts her and emails her and that keeps her hopes up that he’ll get back together with her.”

“Oh,” I said. Not good.

“I mean, she does it first,” Jenny said. “Texts him or whatever. But he always gets back to her and then she thinks he still cares.”

“I’m sure he does still care.”

“Not the way she wants him to.” She put the spray bottle in the cabinet beneath the sink and tossed the paper towels in the trash. “I think he’s being mean,” she said.

“It’s a double whammy for her.” I slipped the chili into a plastic grocery bag. “First her dad and then Cleve.” Poor Grace. She’d been so close to Sam. I’d envied that. Ted and Jenny didn’t connect the way Sam and Grace had. “I feel bad for her,” I said.

“Me, too.” Jenny washed her hands at the sink, then leaned back against the counter as she dried them with a paper towel. “I can’t imagine Daddy dying, Mom,” she said. “It’s hard enough having Noelle die and Great-Grandpa at hospice.”

“I know, baby.” One of the hospice nurses had called me that morning to tell me my grandfather wanted to see me alone the next time, without Jenny or Ted. I had no idea why, but I’d honor his wish, of course. I’d do anything for him.

I stepped closer to Jenny, brushed aside the hair that nearly covered her left eye and planted a kiss on her temple. “Love you,” I said.

“You, too.” She shook her head to let the curtain of hair fall across her forehead again. Then she looked at the bag on the counter. “Ready to lock up?”

“Uh-huh.” I put my arm around her as we headed for the back door. I’d miss spending so much time with her if she cut back her hours in the café. “So how serious is it getting with Devon?” I asked.

“Not serious,” she said.

I felt the invisible wall go up between us and knew our mother/daughter bonding moment had passed. There’d be no getting it back this evening. That was all right. I’d remember these few minutes with Jenny as I tried to track down Anna, the woman who’d never had the chance to know her daughter because of what Noelle had done.

I sat down at one of the computers in the library, pulled up the NC Live website and typed in the password they’d given me at the desk. At home, I’d checked Google for Anna and baby and Wilmington and hospital and received plenty of useless hits. I was hoping NC Live would give me something more to go on.

According to Noelle’s record books, the last baby she delivered had been a boy, so our guess that she’d given up practicing after the “accident” was wrong. Unless, of course, she’d written nothing at all about that botched delivery in her records. I wanted to find the newspaper article Noelle had mentioned in the letter she’d started to write on July 8, 2003. Maybe an impossible task, but I needed to try.

It took me a while and some help from one of the librarians, but I finally found the search page for the Wilmington Star. Noelle’s letter didn’t say exactly when she saw the article mentioning Anna. NC Live only had issues of the Star back to April 2003, so I hoped the article was later than that. Maybe it actually appeared on the eighth and that was what prompted Noelle to write to her.

Optimistically, I decided to search June and July 2003 for any Wilmington Star articles containing the name Anna. How many could there be? Fifty-seven, as it turned out. I was swamped by Annas. I began sifting through the articles—obituaries, track team results, a crooked sheriff, a couple of births. I narrowed the results down to women who might have been of childbearing age during the years Noelle was a midwife. There was an Anna who won a Yard of the Month award, a twenty-seven-year-old Special Olympics athlete and a woman who stole beer from an IGA store. I jotted down the surname of the Yard of the Month winner—Fischelle—who seemed the only real possibility. She lived in midtown. I pictured her putting all her energy into her yard to try to fill the empty place her missing child had left behind.

I searched online for her. There was only one Anna Fischelle, and she did indeed live in Wilmington, but as close as I could figure from the White Pages website, she was about sixty-eight years old.

I tried another search of the Wilmington paper using the words hospital and baby and missing, but none of the results seemed promising. I sat back and frowned at the computer.

Time to get serious. Noelle had been a news junkie. At one time, she’d even had the New York Times delivered to her door in Wilmington each morning, but that had been long ago, before she started reading it online. I knew she’d read the Washington Post online, too, because she was always complaining about how conservative it had become. She read it, anyway. She loved any excuse to rail against pundits who annoyed her.

I tried the Post first, searching for an Anna between June 1 and July 8, 2003, and quickly had ten pages of two hundred and two results. I stared up at the library ceiling. This was a losing battle. It seemed silly to look at the Post and would be sillier still to look at the New York Times. The baby was taken from a Wilmington hospital. The article had almost certainly been in the Wilmington paper. I was about to switch back to the Star when my eye fell on a headline halfway down the first page of results: Police Defend Actions in Case of Missing Three-year-old Girl. I stared at the headline, caught by the word missing. But that couldn’t be the right article. The child Noelle had taken had been an infant. Maybe it was because I felt lost in a sea of search results and didn’t know what else to do that I clicked on the headline and began scanning the article for the name Anna.

On June 3, 2003, a little Maryland girl had disappeared from a campground in the Shenandoah Valley while vacationing with her family. Apparently, there’d been some controversy over the way the police had dealt with her disappearance, and that’s where Anna came in. I found her in the very last sentence.Anna Knightly, spokesperson for the Missing Children’s Bureau, defended police handling of the case. “Issuing an Amber Alert with only a physical description of the child would have been inappropriate,” she stated.

This couldn’t be our Anna, but I checked Google for her name, anyway. The name Anna Knightly was more common that I could have guessed. Anna Knightlys were breeding dogs, blogging about counted cross-stitch and teaching school. I added the word missing to my search and up popped an article I hadn’t even known I’d been looking for. It appeared in the Washington Post on September 14, 2010—the day Noelle killed herself—and the headline read New Director Named for Missing Children’s Bureau. The article was brief and to the point.Anna Knightly has been named director of the Missing Children’s Bureau. Ms. Knightly has worked with the bureau in various capacities since 2001, inspired by the disappearance of her own infant daughter from a North Carolina hospital. She has been committed to the cause of reuniting missing children and their parents since that time.

I sat back in my chair, an icy sweat breaking out all over my body. I didn’t really believe Noelle’s half-written letter until that moment. I couldn’t picture her stealing a pack of gum, much less an infant. I couldn’t imagine her living a life of lies. Yet here it was. Here was the proof.

Now, what was I supposed to do with it?

23

Noelle

Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina

1989

“Hey, Galloway Girls,” Sam said from the back door of the little oceanfront cottage, “here’s my contribution to dinner tonight.”

Flanked by Emerson and Tara, Noelle walked across the musty-smelling living room and peered into the bucket Sam was holding. Four sad-looking, silver-scaled fish lay one on top of the other in the bottom of the bucket.

“Wow, excellent!” Tara said.

“What are they?” Emerson asked.

“Fish.” Sam grinned proudly.

Emerson swatted his arm. “I meant what kind.”

“Who cares.” He laughed. The four of them had been at the beach for two days and his skin was already a rich caramel, his eyes the color of the sky behind his head.

Noelle could see that at least one of the fish was still alive and laboring to breathe. She shuddered and raised her eyes from the bucket to Sam’s face.

“You’re a brute, Sam,” she said.

Sam looked in the bucket himself. “I don’t think they suffered too much,” he said, but now he actually looked a little worried and that touched her. Sam was a softie.

He leaned over to peck Tara on the cheek. “I’ll clean them out here,” he said. “I just wanted to show them off first.”

The oceanfront house on Wrightsville Beach was small and funky and perfect. Tara and Sam had the largest bedroom, while Emerson had the nicest of the smaller ones. She’d suggested that she and Noelle draw straws for it, but Noelle told her to take it. She would do anything for Emerson. She said it didn’t matter which room she had and that was the truth. She was happy just to be at the beach with friends she’d come to love over the past ten months. She would never have the tight, freshman roommate bond that existed between Tara and Emerson, since she was three years older and had spent the year as their RA, but both of the younger women had become the closest friends she’d ever had. Early on, she’d worried that they’d think she was insinuating herself into their lives, but she gradually felt their genuine affection for her. They accepted her, quirks and all, the way few people had.

In some ways, though, she was even closer to Sam.

It turned out he’d been a teaching assistant in her Medicine and the Law course early in the semester and she discovered he was far more than just a pretty face. While her professor focused on how medical personnel could protect themselves from lawsuits, Sam seemed more concerned about the patients and Noelle loved that about him. He became a part of her world both in the classroom and out. They’d fallen into a pattern of meeting at the restaurant in the student union during their break after class, and she’d tell him about patients she was working with in her clinicals and he was always fascinated. Always concerned. She’d thought of lawyers as calculating hustlers who twisted the truth to suit their clients’ needs, but Sam would never be that sort of lawyer. She hoped law school wouldn’t jade him. He’d be going in the fall and she warned him at least once a week to hang on to his values the way she’d hung on to hers during nursing school.

Their conversations in the student union would occasionally stray from the professional to the personal, and she’d share with him things she usually kept to herself. Her father’s desertion. Her mother’s midwifery. She’d point out the handful of men she’d slept with, as well as the men who wanted her whom she’d turned away, disinterested.

“You like the kooks,” he said to her.

“What do you mean?”

“The guys you’ve slept with.” He nodded toward one of them who was sitting at a nearby table, hunched over a book, his waist-long braid over his shoulder. “They’re outside the norm.”

They were. So was Sam, in his own way, and if he had not already been taken she would have hoped for something more with him. She knew he was attracted to her, yet his commitment to Tara was as strong as if they’d been promised to each other at birth.

Things would be so different in the fall, and that’s what made this summer and her time with her friends so precious. In the fall, Sam would be in law school at Wake Forest and she’d be heading to midwifery school in Greenville. While she was excited about getting closer to her goal, she felt a profound sadness at the thought of being apart from Emerson, Tara and Sam.

Especially, of course, Emerson.

Although her mother knew she’d befriended Emerson, she thought Noelle had made a sort of peace with the whole situation and could leave it alone. She would leave it alone, yes. She had no desire to hurt anyone. But peace? Peace was impossible.

All during the year, she’d hoped that Emerson’s parents might visit her from California and Noelle would finally get to meet her birth mother. That never happened. Once, Emerson’s grandparents visited unexpectedly from Jacksonville, but Noelle arrived back in the dorm mere minutes after they’d left. Ironically, she’d felt relieved. She was afraid that a surprise meeting with her grandparents might have caused her to blurt out something she’d later regret. She wanted to meet them, but she needed to be prepared.

The fourth night in the cottage at Wrightsville Beach, Noelle woke up with a start. She lay quietly in the darkness trying to figure out what had jolted her awake. Voices? The phone? Everything was so still.

Suddenly, though, her bedroom door flew open.

“Noelle, wake up!” Sam moved toward her bed. He shook her shoulder, and she sat up, brushing her hair back from her face with her hands.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Emerson’s mother’s dead!” he said. “She—”

“What?”

“Her father just called. They were riding bikes and she was hit by a car. Emerson is—”

“Oh, no.” She swung her legs over the side of her bed and pulled on her shorts, her hands shaking. This couldn’t be happening. “Where’s Emerson?”

“She ran out to the beach.” Sam headed for the living room. “She’s hysterical. Tara’s gone after her and I’m on my way out there.”

“I’m right behind you,” she said.

They ran through the living room and onto the porch.

Sam pushed open the screen door and Noelle followed him out to the beach. She couldn’t absorb this. Her mother dead? No, no, no.

The air was like tar, thick and black, and the sea was so calm that they could hear Emerson before they saw her. The keening tore at Noelle’s heart. They found her sitting in a crumpled heap in the sand, Tara cradling her in her arms like a child.

“I can’t believe it!” Emerson wailed. “I can’t believe it!”

Noelle and Sam dropped to the sand next to them, wrapping their arms around both Emerson and Tara. Sam and Tara murmured words of comfort, but Noelle had no voice. It was caught fast in her throat and she was glad of the darkness so she could shed her own tears for the mother she would never have the chance to know.

None of them slept that night. There were a dozen more phone calls, arrangements being made, flights being booked. Tara decided she would fly to California with Emerson. Noelle somehow missed the information about Emerson’s grandparents picking them up for the drive to the airport, so she was the one who opened the cottage door and came face-to-face with a man whose vivid blue eyes were very much like her own. She knew instantly who he was and she stood frozen in the living room, her hand locked on the doorknob.

“I’m Emerson’s grandpa,” he said. “Are they ready?” He had starbursts of laugh lines at the corners of each eye as though he laughed often and hard. He wasn’t laughing now, though.

Noelle’s mouth was dry as sand. She knew she should say something—I’m sorry for your loss—but the words wouldn’t form. “I’ll get her,” she finally managed to say. She turned around and saw Sam walking toward the door. “Tell Emerson her grandfather’s here,” she said, heading for the bath room. “I don’t feel well.”

She’d wanted to hug Emerson and Tara goodbye. Instead, she stayed in the small bathroom, sitting fully dressed on the toilet, waiting for them to leave. She heard muffled voices through the door. Voices belonging to her sister. Her grand father. She sat there alone as the sound of slamming car doors sifted through the screen of the bathroom window.

Still, she didn’t budge from the bathroom. She stayed there so long that Sam finally knocked on the door. “Noelle? You okay?” he asked.

She splashed water on her face and walked out of the room into the hallway. “I’m all right.” She didn’t look at him. She wasn’t sure what was written in her face, but she didn’t want him to read it.

“Tara and Emerson wanted to say goodbye.”

“I just…I was nauseous for a minute.”

Sam looked at his watch. “I can’t believe it’s only two,” he said. “It feels like days since that call came this morning.”

“I know.” She felt him staring at her. “I’m going to read in my room for a while,” she said.

“Sure you’re okay?” he asked.

“Are any of us okay right now?”

He shook his head. “I guess not,” he said, but he was looking at her with a mixture of worry and curiosity, and she had to turn away.

She wanted to call her mother to tell her what had happened and yet she wasn’t ready. She would cry too hard and her mother would worry about her, but Noelle knew she would not be able to sympathize. Not the way she needed her to. Her mother already had such mixed feelings about Noelle’s secret closeness to her biological family.

She picked up the phone a few times and started to dial the number at Miss Wilson’s, but each time she put the receiver down again. Finally, she walked out to the beach where Sam was sitting in a beach chair, an open book resting on his bare thighs. She knelt in the sand next to his chair as if she were about to pray. She wrapped her hands around his arm, warm beneath her palms.

“Can I talk to you?” she asked.

He set down his book, and although she couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses she saw the concern in his face. “Of course you can talk to me,” he said.

She reached forward to lift his sunglasses to his forehead. “I can’t see your eyes,” she said. “I need to see them.”

He squinted, studying her for a moment. “Are you all right?”

She shook her head.

“Let’s go inside.” He handed her his book, then stood and folded his chair. He carried the chair in one hand and put his other arm around her shoulders as they walked back to the cottage.

Noelle’s throat felt tight and achy. Could she do this? Could she tell someone? Would she be able to get the words out? Should she?

Sam motioned to the rockers on the screened porch and they sat down. “Talk to me,” he said.

She opened her mouth, but her throat locked tight around her voice and she lowered her face to her hands. Sam pulled his rocker right in front of hers and she felt his hands on either side of her head, his lips against her temple. It was exactly what she needed. The comfort of a friend. The comfort of a friend she knew loved her.

She lifted her head, wiping her tears with her fingers, and Sam sat back in his rocker, unsmiling. He rested his fingertips on her bare knee as he waited for her to get her emotions under control.

“What I say now…” She shook her head. Tried again. “If I tell you something, Sam, can you promise me you’ll never tell anyone? Not even Tara. Not ever.”

He hesitated, a line of worry between his eyebrows. “Yes,” he said. “I promise.”

Noelle licked her lips. “Emerson is my half sister,” she said.

The line in his forehead deepened. “She’s…” He cocked his head to the side as though he must have misunderstood her. “What are you talking about?”

“Her mother was my mother.”

“But I’ve met your mother,” he said.

“You’ve met my adoptive mother.”

Her meaning was slowly sinking in. He rocked back in his chair. “Holy shit,” he said.

“No one knows,” she said. “Only my adoptive mother and me. And now you.”

She explained everything. The file she’d found. How she’d felt when she saw Emerson’s name on the list of students at Galloway. How her mother made her swear she would never tell any of this to a soul.

“Was it legal?” Sam asked. “Your adoption?”

“Yes, although there might have been some…I think my parents got some preferential treatment because my mother was involved in my birth. I don’t know. At this point, it really doesn’t matter.”

“So you… Shit.” His eyes widened. “You lost your biological mother this morning and you can’t tell anyone.”

She felt her lower lip tremble. “Except you.”

“Your father,” he asked. “Do you know who…?”

She looked down at her knees where his tan fingers still rested against her fair skin and shook her head. “Some boy she met at a party,” she said. “I don’t even have a name for him.” She pounded her own knee with her fist. “That was my grandfather at the door earlier!” she said. “My grandfather. And I just stood there staring at him.”

“I’m so sorry, Noelle,” Sam said.

“I don’t exist for that family. I couldn’t say anything.”

“Maybe…” Sam looked through the screens toward the beach. “You know how sometimes women who relinquish their kids for adoption later agree to have the records unsealed if both parties want to—”

“She didn’t,” Noelle said. “I’ve checked. I’m just a giant hideous reminder of a mistake she made. That’s all right. I have a great mother, so I lucked out. But I thought I’d…” Her voice broke and she struggled to go on. “I thought I’d get to meet my birth mother someday,” she said. “I thought there was time.”

Sam stood and held out his hand. “Come here,” he said, and when she stood, he closed his arms around, holding her while she cried. There were men who would be afraid of what she’d told him, she thought. Men who’d fear that level of intimacy or who’d crumble under the weight of such a monumental secret. But Sam felt like a pillar beneath her arms. Someone she could lean on. Someone she could talk to about anything. Her biggest wishes. Her worst secrets. Someone she’d be able to talk to. Always.

They spent the next three days together in the cottage. Tara would return on the evening of the third day, though Emerson would stay with her relatives in California another week. Noelle would always treasure those three days with Sam—days of a friendship that deepened by the hour. The only difficult thing was that she knew there was only one Sam and he was not hers. She’d always thought she could live without a man, easily. This man, though, she was not so sure she could live without.

By the morning of the third day, she’d found her smile again. She and Sam had cooked together, gone out to eat one night, rubbed sunscreen on each other’s backs, swam in the sea and talked and talked and talked. The words felt like an aphrodisiac to Noelle, but she fought back the desire. He was not hers. Don’t ever hurt another woman the way Doreen hurt me, her mother had told her. Never, she thought, lying in her bed at night, wishing Sam could be beside her. Never.

“I want you to know something,” he said to her the night before Tara returned. They’d built a small illegal fire on the beach and were toasting marshmallows on bamboo skewers they’d found in the cottage.

“What’s that?” Noelle nibbled the gooey white candy from the skewer.

“That I love you.” Sam had his eyes on his skewer instead of on her. “But Tara is it for me. I think you know that.” He glanced at her.

She felt dizzy from the heat of the night as well as from his admission.

“I love you, too,” she said.

He nodded. That was no surprise to him. “You understand how it is with Tara and me, don’t you? Our history. And how we’ve always just known we’d be together.”

She nodded. “I love Tara, too,” she said honestly. “If I can’t have you, I’d want her to have you.”

“The sort of life I want, I can have with her.” He seemed lost in his own thoughts. “A normal, settled-down kind of life.”

She felt the slightest sliver of pain. “What am I?” She smiled. “A freak?”

He laughed. “You’re different, Noelle. Wonderfully different. You’re never going to want the big house and the white picket fence and the two kids and a dog.”

She wondered if that was really what he wanted. There was a very large part of Sam Vincent that was not a white-picket-fence sort of guy. But she didn’t want to hurt him or Tara, and debating the merits of a settled-down life with him could only lead down that path.

“Just be my forever friend, okay?” she asked.

He held his skewer in front of her, offering her the perfect golden marshmallow. “You’ve got it,” he said.

She slipped the marshmallow from the skewer with her fingertips and popped it into her mouth, feeling proud of herself for not asking more of Sam, proud of herself for not hurting Tara, not daring to think that forever was a long, long time.

24

Tara

Wilmington, North Carolina

2010

Noelle’s house looked sad to me as I pulled into the drive way. The painters had scraped much of the blue from the front of the cottage and the siding was mottled and ugly. The sun had just risen, glowing pink in the windows. It was Saturday and I didn’t know if the painters were working today. I hoped not. I was here to work on the garden and I wanted the time to think.

Emerson had found Anna. She was the head of a missing children’s organization, which made her into a real human being to me, a woman who’d lived through an unimaginable horror and come out of it strong and determined. I’d felt sick to my stomach when Emerson called to tell me what she’d learned. With each new piece of information, this woman’s story was going to feel more real and our need to do something about it more inescapable. Emerson was coming over to my house that afternoon and we’d figure out what to do next. I knew she regretted ever opening that box of letters.

I got out of my van and surveyed Noelle’s front yard. It was a mess, overgrown and weedy. Noelle’d had no interest in yard work with the exception of the garden. Although I was in charge of that garden until the house was rented, I’d only had time to water it and pull a few weeds. Now, nearly three weeks after Noelle’s death, it needed some major attention. I pictured people driving by the decrepit house and yard, whispering to one another, Something terrible must have happened here. They wouldn’t know the half of it.

Emerson had left Noelle’s gardening tools in a large bucket on the back steps, but I’d brought my own. I sat on the steps, slipping on my kneepads and gloves as I looked out over the yard. It was small, the grass tired, the one tree stunted and scraggly. Someone had cut the grass recently; I could see the lines left by the mower. The yards on either side of Noelle’s bled into hers. It was a sorry sight. Except for the garden. The rising sun seemed to settle on that corner of the yard, lighting it up like a jewel.

Behind me, Noelle’s house felt so haunted that I shivered and got to my feet, walking away from it and toward the garden. If you have a friend, I pondered, a good friend, a woman you love, and you learn she’s done something abominable, do you stop loving her? In spite of everything we were learning about Noelle, I refused to forget what she’d meant to us. To me. I was haunted by the note she’d left behind in which her one request was to take care of her garden. I would do that for the Noelle I knew and loved. The Noelle who lied and deceived had not been well, and I blamed all of us for not recognizing that fact and taking better care of her.

The garden was laid out in a triangle, the sides about seven feet long, and it was bursting with color in spite of the fact that we were now into October. Containers of all shapes and sizes were filled with chrysanthemums that she must have planted right before she died. I got to work, cutting back the coneflowers and black-eyed Susans and Shasta daisies. I weeded around the impatiens. I’d brought a flat of pansies with me and I carried it from the van and planted them around the birdbath. I felt as though I wasn’t alone—the little bronze girl on her tiptoes was so real that I started talking to her.

“Look at these herbs,” I said to her as I weeded around the parsley. Noelle had tricolor sage and pineapple sage and rosemary. She had gorgeous Thai basil. I cut some of every herb to give to Emerson that afternoon.

I was deadheading the mums when I remembered a conversation I’d had with Sam not long before he died.

“What’s with Noelle’s garden?” he’d asked me in bed one night.

“What do you mean?” The question seemed so out of the blue.

“She was telling me about it.” Sam rarely had a reason to go to Noelle’s house. He’d probably never even seen her garden.

“Well, it’s tiny but beautiful,” I said. “She loves it and she has a real green thumb, though you’d never know it from the front yard.”

“She said she has a special birdbath.”

I described the birdbath to him and told him about the reporters who’d wanted to write about it and how she wouldn’t let them. It hadn’t struck me as strange that Sam asked me about the garden at the time. I figured Noelle had collared him at a party and talked his ear off. Now, though, I wondered if that conversation had taken place over lunch in Wrightsville Beach. Something about them getting together like that still upset me. Not that I thought they were having an affair—I couldn’t picture that at all—but I was bothered that neither of them had ever mentioned it to me. Ian was probably right that it had to do with Noelle’s will, in which case I suppose it made sense that Sam never mentioned it. Either way, I would never be able to know the answer. Maybe that’s what bothered me the most.

A few hours later, I was in my kitchen with the coffee brewing as I waited for Emerson. I’d made a fruit salad the night before, some of which I’d tried to push on Grace before driving her to the Animal House that morning, but she’d wanted a Pop-Tart and that was it.

Emerson was bringing over some of her zucchini and Gruyère cheese quiche and homemade coffee cake. How she could cook with everything that was going on was beyond me, but baking and eating had always been the way she coped with stress. I coped by straightening up, which was why I’d cleaned the windows in the kitchen before I made the mimosas. Now I opened the cabinet above the coffeemaker to get out my blue-and-white floral cups. Tucked behind them, sticking up like sore thumb, was the ugly old purple-striped travel mug Sam had used every day. It stopped my heart every time I saw it and I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t gotten rid of it when I’d donated his clothes and cleaned out his desk. I took out two of the blue-and-white cups and set them on the counter. Then I carefully reached behind the rest of the cups for the travel mug. I carried it to the mudroom and tossed it in the box I’d take to Goodwill sometime this week. The box was now full, ready to go. For some reason, getting rid of the mug seemed even more final than taking Sam’s name off the voice mail and I felt sad as I folded the cardboard flaps down tight. Back in the kitchen, I pictured him with that mug heading out the door each morning—except that last morning. If the doorbell hadn’t rung at that moment, I might have pulled the mug out of the box again.

Emerson and I carried platefuls of quiche and cups of coffee into my living room and sat on the sofa. On the coffee table, Emerson had stacked Noelle’s record books along with a copy of the newspaper article she’d found about Anna Knightly. I’d read it already—several times—but I read it again now. The few lines made me shudder.

“Well, I think it’s clear this is our woman,” I said. “Our Anna.” I didn’t know why I’d started thinking of her as “our Anna.” It was as though she’d become our responsibility.

“Now we have to figure out who has her baby,” Emerson said.

“We’ll have to involve the authorities if we get that far,” I said.

Emerson sighed. “I know. I just… This is such a mess. I haven’t been able to find anything to pinpoint exactly when her baby was taken. The article makes it sound like it was around 2000, but Noelle says ‘years ago’ in the letter she wrote, which makes it sound like more time had passed.”

“Although Noelle wrote that letter in 2003,” I pointed out.

“True,” Emerson said. “Still ‘years ago’ sounds like a long time.”

“Which is the last record book?” I asked, and Emerson handed the top volume to me.

“We know the ‘last baby’ theory doesn’t hold water, since it was a boy,” she said, “but I have to say the last six months or so of her records are not as…I don’t know, as complete and orderly as they used to be.”

I looked at the last record. “Nineteen ninety-eight.” I shook my head. “Still hard to believe that’s when she stopped practicing and we never knew it.”

“And if you look, you’ll see she really slowed down before then. There are weeks between each delivery toward the end. The only other possibility is if there were records she kept someplace else. I went through every sheet of paper in her house, though. Ted and I have emptied the whole place out now. I didn’t find anything else.”

“Maybe she destroyed some records before she died,” I suggested as I flipped through the pages. “She never would have wanted us to know about this.” I came to a page that was completely obliterated by a black marker. “This might be it, don’t you think?” I asked. “Why else would she black it out?”

“That’s my guess, too,” Emerson said. “And look.” She reached for the book and I stood to hand it to her. Emerson flattened it open on the coffee table, spreading the pages apart. Leaning over, I could see that a page had been torn out.

“Is that right next to the blacked-out page?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” Emerson said.

“That must be it.” I ran my finger down the torn sheet. “Have you tried to read what’s under the black?”

“It’s impossible to make out,” Emerson said.

“What year is it?” I asked.

“The babies born before and after this record are both in ’97,” Emerson said.

“Why didn’t she just tear that page out, too?”

“I think because there are notes about another case on the back of it.”

“Maybe that boy baby wasn’t actually her last delivery,” I said. “Maybe she tore out the pages on the last one, too.”

“She didn’t,” Emerson said. “No torn pages after that baby was born.”

“Can I tear this page out?” I pointed to the page that had been blacked out by the marker. “We could hold it up to the light and maybe be able to read the writing behind the marker.”

“Okay.”

“Let me get a knife.” I hopped to my feet. In the kitchen, I pulled the paring knife from the knife block and carried it back to the living room. Emerson took it from me. She ran the blade carefully along the inner edge of the page, then tore the sheet of paper cleanly from the book as though she did that sort of surgery every day.

“Here.” I reached for the page since I was already on my feet. I carried it to the window and pressed it against the glass. It was hard to see the letters behind the black marker and they bled into the writing on the back of the page. “I think it’s an R-a-b-a-e-e-a…oh, those first two a’s are e’s. Rebecca?”

Emerson stood behind me now, so close I could feel her breath on my neck. “Can you see the last name?” she asked.

My eyes were already tearing from trying to make out the letters. “Is the first letter a B?” I stepped aside to let Emerson take my place at the window.

“Baker?” she said. “Rebecca Baker.”

“Good job!” I said. “Of course, now we have to figure out what we do with the name.”

“I can’t make out the address at all.” Emerson was still scrutinizing the sheet of paper against the windowpane.

“We can check online for her.” I was looking at the record book again. “I still think Noelle would have stopped after it happened,” I said. “Don’t you, Em? I mean, there are a bunch of babies born after this one. After Rebecca’s. Have you read the entry for the last girl born.”

“Yes,” Emerson said. “The last baby was a boy, but the baby before him was a girl. And the records look fine, just a little…sloppy.”

I read the name of Noelle’s second to last patient. “Denise Abernathy. That’s the girl’s mother,” I said. “I think we should check her out in addition to Rebecca.”

Emerson sat down on the sofa again, the blacked-out sheet of paper in her hand. She tapped her fingers to her lips. “How exactly are we going to do this?” she asked. “Try to meet these women and see if their daughters look like them or what?”

I gnawed my lip. What would we do with these names? “Well,” I said, “I guess we need to make up a reason to talk to them. I know it’s…creepy, but how else can we do it?”

She nodded. “I’ll try to find the Denise woman and you try to find Rebecca?” She sounded very unsure of herself, but in spite of the somber nature of what we were doing, I felt my usual thrill at taking on a new project. But then I remembered Grace’s words. You just stay busy so you don’t have to think about anything, she’d said. So you can forget about how messed up your life has gotten.

Well, I thought, what’s so wrong with that?

25

Anna

Alexandria, Virginia

Haley sat at the kitchen table doing her homework Sunday morning while Bryan and I straightened up after a late breakfast. She had on her blue-and-yellow-dotted bandanna today, her favorite. She’d been home all weekend, riding bikes with Bryan, helping me play catch-up in the office and watching movies with a friend in our basement den. Today, the Collier cousins were coming, as they did every year for Alexandria’s fall festival, and Haley was excited. The streets of Old Town Alexandria would be roped off and booths set up with food and artwork and handcrafted things. My town house was only a couple of blocks from the heart of Old Town and the girls could walk there easily while Marilyn, Bryan and I hung out at the house. In years past, it had been just Marilyn and me and I wondered how Bryan would fit in. Marilyn was divorced, too, and she and I had always gotten along well, talking mostly about the kids. In the early years, we commiserated about Bryan and what an asshole he was to walk out on Haley and me, but after a while he no longer figured into our conversation or our lives. She’d been as shocked as I was when he suddenly showed up two months ago. She still nursed some anger at him, but I’d told her I was done with it now. Life’s too short, I wrote her in an email last week. He’s back now and he’s wonderful with Haley. That’s what matters.

The first week’s search for a donor had come up empty, but Dr. Davis told us that wasn’t uncommon and not to panic. I’d only panicked—truly panicked—once in my life, and that was when I realized that Lily had vanished into thin air as though she’d never been born. I didn’t panic when Haley had her first bout with leukemia or even when she was diagnosed this second time. It was as though I’d worn out my ability to reach that level of anxiety with Lily’s disappearance. I was scared now, yes, but we had to take things one day at a time and the fact that Haley was doing well made that easier.

Her blood work looked good. She looked good. I sometimes wondered if her diagnosis could possibly be wrong. I knew that was crazy, but when she looked and acted so healthy, it was hard to believe she was actually so sick.

“Check out the cardinals,” Bryan said from where he stood at the kitchen sink. Haley and I looked out the sliding glass doors to see the male and female cardinals on the bird feeder.

“Cool,” said Haley. She got up from the table to move closer to the glass. “The cardinals never come to the feeder,” she said. “It’s that new seed we got, Mom.”

“Could be,” I agreed, but I wasn’t watching the cardinals. I was watching Bryan, who was leaning closer to the window, absorbed in the birds. Since his return, I’d barely noticed how he looked except to see that he had a few lines in his face now and that his hair was slowly on its way to gray. But the sun filled his eyes as he stood at the sink, and for the first time since before Lily was born and my world collapsed I felt a physical yearning for a man. For him. It had been so long since I’d experienced anything approaching desire that I barely recognized the feeling.

My life since Bryan had been all about children—taking care of Haley and looking for missing kids as a way to deal with my own lost child. It hadn’t been about men. I had women friends, both married and unmarried, and they were always talking about guys. They’d shake their heads at my total lack of interest. All I wanted was to get Haley safely grown up and to make the Missing Children’s Bureau more effective at performing miracles for frightened families.

I hadn’t completely withered away as a woman, though. There were certain celebrities who could still make me weak in the knees. I just wasn’t up to dating real-life, complicated and—too often—untrustworthy guys.

Suddenly, though, Bryan was back. In these past few weeks since I felt myself softening toward him, I realized that I liked him as a person. He was no longer the handsome young guy I’d fallen in love with when I was twenty-one, and he was no longer the man who’d deserted me when Haley got sick. He was someone new. Older, wiser, braver, contrite. He cared deeply about Haley and her sense of security with him was growing. Now I wondered if there could be something more between us. Not what we once had, but something different. Something better.

He was serious about not leaving. He’d had a job inter view in D.C. a few days ago and now the company had asked him to fly to San Francisco for an interview at their headquarters. He’d told them yes, as long as the job itself would be in D.C. He wasn’t leaving.

“What time is it?” Haley took her seat at the table again.

“Nearly eleven,” I said. “They should be here any minute.”

“I wish they’d hurry up!” She closed her history book and got to her feet. She was antsy this morning. She had to return to Children’s tomorrow for more of the maintenance chemo and I knew that had to be on her mind.

“It’s got to be hard to think about going back to the hospital tomorrow,” I said as I poured water into the coffeemaker.

She screwed up her face at me. “That’s why I don’t think about it, Mom,” she said. “Why’d you even have to bring it up?”

“Sorry,” I said, and Bryan gave me a sympathetic smile. Haley’s steroid-induced irritability was in full force, but I didn’t blame her for snapping at me. She did a better job of living in the moment than I did. Today, she had no nasty poison pumping into her veins and I needed to let her savor every second of that freedom.

I was pushing the start button on the coffeemaker when we heard a car door slam out front.

“They’re here!” Haley yelled, and ran toward the living room. I followed her into the room and saw her pull the door open, then freeze. “Holy shit!” she shouted loud enough for people on the other side of Alexandria to hear. “Mom, look!”

I walked to her side and saw Marilyn getting out of her car as four bald-headed girls ran up the front walk.

“Oh, my God.” I laughed, stunned and moved. Haley ran out the front door and down the walk and I watched the four bald heads and one blue-and-yellow-dotted ban danna bouncing up and down as the girls hugged one another. “Bryan!” I called toward the kitchen. “Bring your camera.”

He came to the door. “Look at that,” he said with a smile as he snapped a picture. Then he put his arm around me and it felt right. He gave my shoulder a squeeze before dropping his hand to his side again.

Marilyn skirted the clot of girls on the walk and smiled at me as she climbed the front steps. “It was their idea.” She gave me a big hug, then a shorter, more anemic one to her brother.

“That’s the sweetest thing,” I said, pointing to the girls. I watched as one of the twins—I had no idea which one—handed out turquoise baseball caps to each of her sisters and Haley. The cousins had all had their cheeks swabbed during the past week. Everyone I knew had had his or her cheek swabbed, and not one of them was a match for Haley. Not even close.

Haley whipped off her bandanna and all five girls put on their hats, giggling and pointing at one another as they headed toward us.

“Girls,” I said to my nieces, “you’ve blown my mind.”

“That’s a beautiful thing you did,” Bryan said to them.

It had been hard enough to tell my four nieces apart when they had hair. Now, it was impossible. Twelve-year old Melanie was the only one I could pick out with certainty. She was thinner, slighter and smaller breasted than her sisters, but she still shared their round brown eyes, their small chins and the smattering of freckles across their noses.

“We had to drive like ten blocks out of our way to get here because the streets are blocked off for the festival,” one of the girls said.

“Can we have money, Mom?” Melanie asked Marilyn. “I know I’m going to want to buy a ton of stuff.”

Marilyn doled out a twenty to each of her daughters and I reached for my purse where it hung from the banister, but Bryan beat me to it, pressing a bill into Haley’s hand.

“Thanks, Dad.” Haley grinned. Then the girls were gone as quickly as they’d arrived, a whirlwind spinning down the sidewalk, this time with Haley at its center.

“God, she looks so good!” Marilyn said as we followed Bryan toward the kitchen. “If it weren’t for the round face and the hair—the lack of hair—I’d have no idea anything was wrong.”

“I know,” I said. “She’s tough as nails.”

“And how about you? How are you holding up?” She stopped walking, turning me toward her and holding me by the shoulders to study my face. She leaned close to whisper, “Is it a help or a hindrance having Bryan around?”

It’s wonderful, I thought. “He’s been a huge help,” I said. “The bone marrow drive is set for next week and he’s taken care of all the arrangements himself.”

“I’m so glad he’s coming through for you,” Marilyn said.

“What are you two talking about?” Bryan asked when we reached the kitchen.

“You.” Marilyn put her arm around him. “Tell me all about the bone marrow drive. How can I help?”

“How about some coffee first?” I asked, and she nodded and sat on one of the bar stools at the island.

“Well—” Bryan pulled out another of the stools and sat down facing his sister “—we’re going to get some press going. The Post will be sending someone to Children’s this week to interview Haley and Anna. Then closer to the drive, one of the TV stations will do a piece on them, too.”

“Really?” Marilyn looked a little worried. “That’s okay with Haley?” she asked me.

I nodded. “She understands why we’re doing it. We might not find a donor for her through the drive, but if we can get a few hundred more people to register in the global data bank, it might help someone else.” I did have misgivings about going public. I’d never been quiet about my own story—how Lily’s disappearance led to my passion for finding missing children. But I wasn’t entirely comfortable trotting Haley’s story out for all the world to see. Yet I knew Bryan was right. From everything I’d heard, personalizing the need for a bone marrow donor was the best way to encourage people to show up for the drive.

We drank coffee and talked a while longer, then Marilyn looked out the window. “It’s the most beautiful day,” she said. “What do you say we go to the festival, too? It’ll be fun.”

So that’s what we did. We strolled among the throng of visitors and vendors along King Street with what seemed like every other citizen of northern Virginia. Occasionally we’d catch a glimpse of five turquoise baseball caps in the crowd and we’d head in the opposite direction to let them enjoy their independence. It choked me up a little every time I saw them. I knew it would be Haley’s last day of feeling well for a while. One of her last days to act like just another kid. For today, she was one of five giggling bald girls in a turquoise baseball cap.

I tried to adopt my daughter’s living-in-the-moment perspective as I walked through the crowd. I tried not to think about our return to Children’s the next day. Instead, I breathed in the scent of hot dogs and popcorn and the river.

I reveled in the friendship of my sister-in-law and the new and unexpected friendship with my ex-husband, and in that moment, the world felt right and full of hope.

26

Tara

Wilmington, North Carolina

Now that I was sitting in my van in front of Rebecca Baker’s house, I was having second thoughts about the plan we’d come up with. Emerson and I must have exchanged a dozen emails trying to figure out what to say to the two women we’d agreed to contact.

I thought we should come as close to the truth as we could without revealing what we knew. We would tell the women that we were Noelle’s closest friends and that we were devastated by her suicide. We knew she’d had some personal problems around the time their children were born, and since they’d had intimate contact with her, maybe they could help us figure out what had been going on with her. We’d say that we just wanted to understand Noelle better. That was certainly the truth. Hopefully, we’d each be able to see photographs of the women’s daughters and, like magic, some utter lack of resemblance would give them away.

That hadn’t happened in Denise Abernathy’s case, though.

Emerson said it had taken all her courage to walk up to the Abernathy’s front door, but when she told Denise why she’d come, Denise invited her in and talked her ear off, raving about Noelle.

I don’t think she’s it, Emerson emailed me after her visit. There are four kids and they’re all green-eyed blonds, like their mother. Denise said Noelle had been wonderful and made it a great experience. Noelle also delivered her older daughter and she said she was upset when she found out Noelle was no longer practicing when she had her last two kids. I bet it’s going to be your Rebecca.

My Rebecca.

I could have used Sam’s guidance as an attorney. Was what we were doing legal? It was certainly unethical, but what choice did we have? Even if Sam were alive, I wouldn’t have been able to talk to him about it and I certainly couldn’t ask Ian. Emerson and I were on our own with this burden.

So now I sat in front of Rebecca Baker’s house, reminding myself I was an actress. I could do this.

I’d dawdled as much as I could since leaving school a few hours ago. Suzanne’s birthday party was only three days away and I’d met with the caterer to iron out a few last-minute details and stopped at the party store to order several dozen helium balloons. I had no more excuses to get in the way of seeing this woman. I stepped out of my van and started walking up the long driveway, hoping no one was home.

I’d had a bigger challenge finding Rebecca Baker than Emerson had had finding Denise, who still lived at the address Noelle had for her in her record book. Rebecca’s address had been blacked out along with her name. Emerson finally found her for me on the LinkedIn professional website. Rebecca Baker was an accountant. There was nothing about a husband or children in her profile, but her age and location fit the woman we were looking for.

On the front porch, I pressed the doorbell and heard a protracted chime from inside the house. Someone was home. I could hear a dog barking. Footsteps. In a moment, a girl a few years younger than Grace opened the door.

“Hey,” she said. She was pixyish, athletic, dark-haired. Her eyebrows were raised in a question. And you are? they asked.

“Hey,” I said back. “I’m Tara Vincent. I’m looking for Rebecca Baker.”

“Hold on.” She pivoted on her heel and headed down the central hall toward a kitchen. I could hear the clang of pots and pans. “Mom!” she called. “It’s someone for you.”

A woman walked toward me dressed in sweats. She raised her eyebrows in the same motion as her daughter, yet she looked nothing like her. Her hair was white-blond. Her eyes a vibrant blue. Nothing like her daughter at all.

“I’m so sorry to interrupt your evening,” I said. “And I know this will sound kind of strange and intrusive, but my name is Tara Vincent and I was a close friend of Noelle Downie.”

She frowned as if trying to follow me. I couldn’t blame her. “I heard Noelle killed herself,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “And I…I’d like to talk with you for a few minutes if you have time. I could come back on a different day if—”

“What about?” she asked.

“Do you have some time now?”

She looked over her shoulder. “Well, you’ll be taking me away from cleaning the kitchen and I don’t mind that sort of interruption.” She pointed to the rockers on the porch. “Have a seat.”

“Thanks.” We moved to the rockers. They were dusty. A little grimy. My cardigan was white and I had to fight the urge to clean the chair with a tissue before I sat down.

“I have to say, I wasn’t surprised to hear that Noelle killed herself,” Rebecca said as she lowered herself into the rocker. “I mean, you were her friend and I’m sorry for your loss, but I’m not surprised.”

Her words jarred me. Those of us close to Noelle had been surprised. What did this stranger know that we didn’t? “Really?” I asked. “How come?”

“She was such a mess the last time I saw her.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, a long time ago. She was my midwife for my first two kids. My son and the girl you met at the door. Petra. Though she didn’t actually deliver Petra. Long story. So what did you want to talk about?”

My mind spun. Noelle didn’t deliver Petra? How did that fit the puzzle we were trying to put together?

“My friends and I were shocked that Noelle killed herself,” I said. “It sounds like you knew her better than we did in a way. We’re really trying to understand why Noelle did what she did. She stopped being a midwife more than ten years ago and we wondered if something happened around then to start her downfall.” The downfall we hadn’t recognized. “So we’re trying to talk to some of Noelle’s last patients to see if we can understand why she became so depressed.” The explanation sounded ridiculously hokey to me, but Rebecca was nodding as though it made perfect sense.

“Well, first I have to tell you that she was great when she delivered my son. I loved her. I couldn’t wait for a repeat performance with Petra. But when she showed up when I went into labor with Petra, she was a mess, like I said. So was I at the time.” She smiled. “I’d been having back labor for days and was not in a good place. So I wouldn’t have realized it if she’d shown up with two heads, but my husband did.”

“What do you mean, ‘she was a mess’?”

“Spaced out.”

“Spaced out?” I repeated. My head felt thick and stupid.

“She was on something and she was very, very loopy. With my son, she was totally in charge and calm and I knew I was in good hands with her.” I nodded.

“Well, that was not the woman who showed up when I went into labor with Petra,” she said. “She was stumbling over her own feet. Her eyes were glassy. If I hadn’t been so worried about myself, I would have been worried about her. I honestly wasn’t sure what to do. It was about 3:00 a.m. and I thought maybe she was still groggy from waking up suddenly, so I just rolled with it for an hour or so, but she didn’t get any better. Finally, my husband said she had to go. I knew he was right, but I was terrified. I figured I’d have to go to the hospital and give birth with a doctor I didn’t know. I heard my husband talking to her in the hall outside my room. He was totally frank, saying that she seemed drugged and he wasn’t comfortable with her taking care of me and he was going to take me to the hospital.”

“What did Noelle say?” I asked.

“Her voice was really quiet and I couldn’t hear, but my husband said she didn’t put up a fight. Almost like she agreed with him. She apologized and said she was having back pain and had probably taken too many pills. She was really upset and apologetic and my husband ended up comforting her. Noelle called this other midwife, Jane Rogers, and said she was sick and could Jane take over. Jane came right away and she was great.”

“She sometimes did need to take pain medication,” I said.

“I’m sorry it had such an impact on you.”

“My husband thought maybe she was an addict.”

“I don’t think she was an addict,” I said, though what did I know? Our theory about the blacked-out name belonging to the woman whose baby had been replaced was crumbling. She was blacked out because Noelle didn’t deliver her baby at all. Still, Petra didn’t look like she came out of the body of this svelte blonde. Might something have happened when Jane delivered the baby and Noelle helped cover it up? I wanted to ask her what she remembered of the delivery. Was the baby out of her sight for a while? Could Noelle have come back? But the questions would make no sense in light of what I’d given as my reason for coming.

“At least Noelle had the good sense to let someone else take over,” I said.

“That’s true,” Rebecca said. “I was angry at the time. My husband thought we should file a complaint against her, but she did the right thing by bringing in someone else and we had a beautiful healthy little girl and that’s what we focused on.”

“She’s adorable,” I said. “I have a teenage daughter, too.”

Rebecca smiled. “You know the challenge, then.”

I felt so comforted by those words. I was not the only mother trying to cope with a teenager. Emerson had so few problems with Jenny that we couldn’t really commiserate.

“Definitely,” I said. I got to my feet. “Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me.”

“Did I help?” she asked.

“Yes, I think you did. We all missed something going on with her that you picked up on. I feel bad about it.”

“I know,” she said. “One of Petra’s friends killed herself last year and she’s been feeling guilty about it ever since, but everybody missed the signs. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.”

As I drove away, it was no longer Noelle I was thinking about, but Rebecca’s comment about Petra’s friend. Teenagers killed themselves. I thought of Grace’s moodiness. Her nightmares. I’d been spending all this time trying to figure out what had been going on with Noelle while my daughter was the greater and more immediate mystery. I felt suddenly frightened. Could I be missing something going on with her, right under my nose? How would I ever know?

Let me in, Gracie, I thought as I drove. Please, honey, let me in.

27

Emerson

Jacksonville, North Carolina

Grandpa looked better when I walked into his room at hospice. Either that, or I was simply getting used to the emaciated, drawn features of his face.

“Hello, honey.” He smiled when he saw me, reaching a frail arm out to draw me into a hug as I leaned over his bedside.

“You look good,” I said, pulling a chair close.

“I let them shave me.” He ran a tremulous hand over his chin. “Just in your honor.”

“I brought you pumpkin bread,” I said. “I left it with your aide and she’s going to bring it to you with dinner.”

“Always loved your pumpkin bread,” he said.

“That’s because you’re the one who taught me how to make it.”

“Oh, hogwash.” He shook his head with a smile. “You outpaced me in the baking department by the time you were ten.” He looked directly at me then, and we both sobered. The nurse had said he wanted to see me alone, without Jenny or Ted, and I knew Grandpa must be seeing this visit as some sort of farewell. Just the thought put tears in my eyes.

“Now don’t cry,” he said. “I haven’t even said anything yet.”

“You wanted to see me alone.” I reached over the bar of the bed to hold his hand.

He nodded. “I need to talk to you,” he said, “and I’m afraid this will shock you a little, honey.”

I pressed my lips together, unable to imagine where this was going. He looked worried about me. “I’m fine,” I said. “You can tell me anything.”

“You have a good friend,” he said. “Noelle Downie.”

He’d met Noelle a few times over the years, but I couldn’t imagine why he’d be talking about her now. I hadn’t mentioned her death to him. There’d seemed no reason to mention it, and something in his voice told me not to bring it up now.

“Yes.” I nodded.

“Noelle is your half sister.”

I leaned toward him, frowning. A few times in recent weeks he’d said things that made no sense. There are butterflies in the bathroom or They always give me spaghetti for breakfast here. The staff told me it was the medications talking. Was that what was happening now?

“What do you mean, Grandpa?” I asked.

“Just what I said. She’s your half sister and my granddaughter. You were never supposed to know.”

“I… Would you explain—”

“Yes.” He turned away from me, looking out the window at the manicured landscape. “I can’t die without telling you the truth about Noelle.” A tear slipped from each of his blue eyes and I reached for a tissue and blotted his cheeks. My mind scrambled to take in what he was telling me.

“Your mother had a baby when she was fifteen years old,” he said.

I sucked in my breath and sat back. “Oh, no.” I tried to picture my mother as a teenager. Discovering she was pregnant. Grappling with a decision. “You’re saying…that was Noelle?”

He licked his parched lips. “Susan was going with Frank at the time, but another boy got her pregnant. We didn’t know until she was pretty far along. Frank didn’t know. No one knew, and Susan wanted it that way. We sent her to your great-aunt Leta’s in Robeson County. She told Frank…well, I don’t remember exactly what she told Frank. That Leta was sick, I think, and she had to help out. Leta found this midwife to take care of your mother and…make the problem go away, so to speak.”

A midwife? Noelle? I felt suddenly, thoroughly confused. I rubbed my forehead. “I don’t understand how—”

“The midwife wanted a child,” he said. “She and her husband adopted the baby.”

“But…how do you know it was Noelle?” I asked. I felt a crushing pain starting low in my rib cage as the loss of one of my closest friends began to grow into a greater loss than I ever could have imagined.

“Around the time your parents moved to California, your mother began toying with the idea of finding her daughter,” he said. “She held off, though. She was afraid to tell your father the truth, even after all that time. Afraid he’d be angry she’d lied to him. But, anyway, your mother knew the midwife had the last name Downie and she knew where she lived and I guess it wasn’t that difficult to find out Noelle’s name. She found all that out right around the time she died, but we never realized you were friends with her…with Noelle…until a while after her death. We were shocked, your grandma and me, the first time you mentioned her name to us. It wasn’t such a coincidence that you both went to UNCW, but to end up friends was just…” He shook his head, then gave me a long look. “Do you think somehow she knew?” he asked.

I thought of Noelle’s will. Naming me executor. I thought of the surprise split of her money with seventy-five percent of her assets going to Jenny. I remembered the first time Tara and I met her in our dorm room. Even years later, we joked about how weird Noelle had been that day, questioning me about my family, my name, my grandparents.

“She knew.” I could barely speak. “I don’t know how she figured it out, but she knew.”

“Your grandma and I decided we’d best keep it to ourselves, since your father never knew about her. We didn’t want to do any harm to his memory of Susan. But now your father’s gone, and I’m about to leave this good earth myself, so it’s time.” He looked at me with hope in his blue eyes. I’d always loved those eyes and suddenly I saw Noelle in them. “I want to ask you a big favor, Emerson,” he said. “Only if you’re comfortable with it, okay? I know it’s a lot to ask.”

I nodded. “Anything,” I said.

“I’d like her to know the truth. I want to spend some time with her. My granddaughter.” His lips trembled in a way I couldn’t bear. “Would that be all right?”

“Oh, Grandpa.” I took his hand again, holding it between both of mine, and then I told him the part of Noelle’s story that I knew. The ending.

28

Tara

Wilmington, North Carolina

Emerson and I sat side by side on the back steps of Noelle’s house, our arms around each other’s shoulders as we looked out toward the garden. We were waiting for Suzanne to stop over to see the house in the hope that she’d become the new tenant. Her current lease wouldn’t be up until the spring, but that was fine with Emerson and Ted, who needed time to renovate.

Suzanne had been in the house many times over the years, but it had been such a mess that when Emerson asked if she was interested in renting, she’d made a face before saying, “Maybe.” She would have to look past the scarred floors and dirty walls and the empty places in the kitchen where new appliances would go. Hopefully, she’d be able to see the potential, because we wanted someone who’d loved Noelle to have her house.

We also wanted to pick Suzanne’s brain a little to see if she knew any more than we did about the waning years of Noelle’s practice. We doubted it since Suzanne herself had been stunned to learn Noelle was no longer a midwife, but it was worth a few questions.

Most of all, though, Emerson and I were grieving all over again, this time for the Noelle we now knew had been Emerson’s sister. We’d been sitting there more than thirty minutes, remembering back to our days in the Galloway dorm when Noelle had befriended us. We’d felt pretty smug back then that this older girl—this woman, really—became our friend over all the other girls on the floor. Why didn’t she ever tell Emerson what she knew? If only she had. If only she and Emerson could have enjoyed their sisterhood out in the open. The truth explained so much. No wonder I’d always had the feeling of being a little on the outside of the two of them. No wonder Noelle seemed to love Emerson just a little bit more than she did me. I wished that Sam were alive so I could tell him. It would blow his mind.

We’d decided not to tell Jenny or Grace yet. Life was too chaotic right now, and besides, Emerson needed some time to absorb the news herself. She’d told Ted, of course, and with her permission, I’d told Ian. He’d come over for dinner last night while Grace went to the movies with Jenny. I felt as though I needed to sneak around with Ian these days. There was nothing between us other than a good and growing friendship, but Grace was so disapproving that I felt uncomfortable even mentioning his name around her.

He’d been astonished when I told him about Noelle and Emerson. He stood in middle of the kitchen, shaking his head in disbelief. “I was engaged to a woman I didn’t know at all,” he said. Then he ran his hand over his thinning blond hair. “I wonder if anybody knew her. It must have been so lonely, being Noelle.” For the first time, I realized he still loved her. Maybe only a little bit, but the love was still there in his eyes and in the sadness of his voice.

“Hello!”

Emerson and I heard Suzanne’s voice coming from inside the house. We’d left the front door open for her.

“We’re out here, Suzanne!” Emerson called, getting to her feet. She looked at me, motioning toward the garden. “We might as well show her the best thing first,” she said.

Suzanne pushed open the screened door and joined us on the porch, her blue eyes round with wonder, as usual. “Hi!” She gave us each a hug, then put on a scolding look. “Listen, you two. You have to let me do something to help with the party.”

“It’s all under control,” I said. Mostly the truth.

“We just want you to have a good time,” Emerson said. Her eyes were a little bloodshot and I hoped Suzanne didn’t notice.

“The house looks so different without Noelle’s things in it,” she said. “Can I help choose the paint colors?”

“Absolutely,” Emerson said. “As well as the stain on the hardwood floors and the tile in the kitchen.”

“Look at Noelle’s garden!” Suzanne started down the porch steps and we followed. “I remember how spectacular it is in the spring.”

“It was Noelle’s pride and joy,” Emerson said.

“Her birdbath.” Suzanne pointed at the little girl on tiptoe. “Isn’t that the sweetest thing? And the herbs!” She bent over to touch the Thai basil. “She’d always give me some. Now I can be the one giving them away.”

Behind her back, Emerson gave me a thumbs-up. “We were hoping you liked gardening,” she said.

“I do, and I’ve had no room to do any of it in the dinky little yard I have now.” Suzanne tore her gaze away from the garden. “Are you sure you can wait till March to rent it? I know that’s a long time.”

“Not a problem,” Emerson said.

“Will Cleve be living with you over the summer?” I asked. The house was fine for one low-maintenance person. Add a teenage boy and I wasn’t so sure.

“He’ll be doing his Habitat for Humanity thing and I know he wants to spend time with his father in Pennsylvania and who knows what else,” she said. “I can fit a daybed in that second bedroom for him, and I’ll probably set up my desk in the living room. Besides, Cleve’s not going to be living with me for the rest of his life, I hope.” She looked at me. “How’s Grace doing?” she asked. There was sympathy in her voice.

“She’s doing well,” I said. I felt protective of Grace. I’d never let Suzanne know how much my daughter missed her son.

“She’s a beautiful girl with beautiful manners,” Suzanne said.

“Thanks.” I smiled. Grace was definitely a beautiful girl, and I was happy to hear that her manners passed muster, at least away from home.

“Suzanne, I wanted to ask you if you knew Jane Rogers,” Emerson said. “She was a midwife who worked with—”

“Oh, sure,” Suzanne said. “She used to work at the Birth Center. She retired years ago and moved to Australia.”

“Australia!” Emerson said.

“You wanted to let her know about Noelle?” Suzanne asked.

I glanced at Emerson, wondering how much to say. “Actually, we were talking to an old patient of Noelle’s who said that when she went into labor, Noelle wasn’t feeling well and called Jane in to take over for her. So we were just wondering who Jane was.”

Suzanne nodded. “That would make sense. They covered for each other. I was really out of the business by then, though. After Cleve was born, I just wanted to play mommy for a while.” She bent down and plucked a leaf from the sage and lifted it to her nose. “Here’s something I’ve been wondering about,” she said. “If Noelle hasn’t been a midwife all these years, why did she still do that rural work every year or so? Some years, she’d be there a few months.” She looked from me to Emerson. Emerson’s eyes were as startled as mine and I knew she was wondering the same thing I was. Were the patients Noelle saw during those months documented in her record books?

“I don’t know, Suzanne,” I said slowly. “There are so many questions and I don’t think we’re ever going to get the answers.”

“Do you know exactly where she’d go?” Emerson asked her.

“I always thought she was going back to where she grew up. She said it was a poor area. A lot of Native Americans.”

“The Lumbee,” I said. “She grew up in Robeson County.” Was that where she went? Had she told us that or did we all just assume it? She’d always stayed in touch with us by email or cell phone, but I didn’t think we’d ever had an actual street address for her.

“Well, listen.” Suzanne sniffed the sage again. “I’m going to walk through the house and think about how my furniture will fit, all right?”

“Absolutely,” Emerson said. “Holler if you have a question.”

We watched her walk back to the house, then turned to each other.

“We’re idiots,” I said. “Are the months when she was away in her record books?”

“I don’t think so. I think I would have noticed addresses outside this area. I bet that’s when it happened.”

“You’re right.” But then I remembered the article about Anna Knightly and shook my head. “Maybe not, though. Anna Knightly’s baby was taken from a Wilmington hospital,” I reminded her. “Robeson County’s, what—an hour and a half away?”

Emerson put her hands on the sides of her head and looked like she wanted to scream. “I’m going to figure this out if it’s the last thing I do,” she said.

My cell phone rang, electronic strains of “All That Jazz” filling Noelle’s backyard. I dug the phone from the purse slung over my shoulder and glanced at the caller ID. Ian.

“Hey, Ian,” I said.

“Where are you?” He sounded almost curt, and I frowned.

“Emerson and I are at Noelle’s. Suzanne is here looking at the—”

“Can the two of you come to my office right now?” he asked.

“Right now?” I looked at Emerson. “We’ve got things we need to do for the party tomorrow.”

“It’s important,” Ian said. “I figured out when Noelle had a baby.”

29

Noelle

Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina

September 1992

This is the most despicable, most insane thing you’ve ever done, she told herself as she walked through the quiet, dimly lit hallway of the Blockade Runner. It was two in the morning and Wrightsville Beach had been sleeping when she pulled into the parking lot of the massive oceanfront hotel. She wanted privacy. She wanted everyone to be sleeping. There was only one other person she wanted to be awake.

She walked into the empty foyer. A huge sign greeted her. Welcome LSAS! She had no idea what the letters stood for. The L was either legal or law. It didn’t matter. She didn’t care about the conference. She turned left and started walking down the hall.

Her life was very full these days, and she was grateful. She was finally doing what she’d longed to do since she was twelve years old—practicing midwifery. She lived ten minutes from Emerson and her new husband, Ted, renting the little Sunset Park house Ted had lived in before he and Emerson were married. Sunset Park was exactly the type of neighborhood Noelle loved: diverse, utterly unpretentious, with a growing sense of community. Emerson was already pregnant and very happy, and when Emerson was happy Noelle was happy.

It seemed ironic that Ted and Emerson, who’d known each other less than a year, were already married while Tara and Sam still were not—although that was about to change. Their wedding was only two weeks away. Tara would have been delighted to get married the day after she graduated from UNC, if not before, but Sam had taken things at a slower pace. He wanted everything in place before he got married, he’d said. He wanted the bar exam behind him and his law practice set up before he took on a wife and family. Now, things were as in place as they were going to get. Tara was in her first year of teaching and Sam had sailed through the bar exam and joined an already established attorney, Ian Cutler, in his practice. Sam could stall no longer. That was the way Noelle had come to view his reluctance to plan the wedding. He was having his doubts, and although he never said as much, she felt certain she was the cause. How could he marry one woman when he had feelings for another? She couldn’t let him. Not without a fight. As full as her life felt, there was one thing missing and that was Sam. His wedding date now loomed on her calendar like a death.

She found his room easily. First floor, oceanfront. They could leave the sliding glass doors open and listen to the sea. She’d gotten the number from Tara, telling her she needed to talk to him about a midwifery case. She hated lying to Tara about why she wanted Sam’s room number. Somehow the lie felt even worse than what she was doing now. But Tara, ever trusting, bought her excuse. It wouldn’t be the first time Noelle had consulted with Sam about one of her patients. He was focusing on health law, which pleased her, and she liked to think she had something to do with his choice since she was always bending his ear with her concerns about child and maternal health. When the five of them got together, she and Sam often wound up talking shop while everyone else discussed wedding plans or the real-estate market. She felt closer to him than ever. He was the only person who knew that she was Emerson’s sister, the only person she could ever talk to about how that relationship gave her both joy and pain.

She knocked on the door to his room, then waited in the silence. Nothing. She knocked again, harder.

Sam pulled the door open and she knew she’d awakened him. His dark hair was tousled, his jeans unsnapped, his chest bare. His eyes widened when he saw her, his lashes so long that they cast shadows on his cheeks from the hallway lights.

“What’s wrong?” he said. “Is Tara all right?”

“Everyone’s fine,” she said. “I just wanted to see you.”

He hesitated a moment, and she knew he was trying to make sense of what she’d said. What she was doing here at two in the morning, two weeks before his wedding.

Reaching for her wrist, he drew her into the room. She walked straight to the unmade side of his bed and sat down on the edge. She felt the light from the night table pool over her and wondered what he saw in her face.

He looked at her, hands on his hips, and for the briefest of moments, neither of them spoke.

“Ah, Noelle,” he said, finally. The words sounded tired. They sounded a little bit like surrender. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to keep you from making a mistake,” she said. “A mistake for both you and Tara. And for me.” She swallowed. For the first time since making the decision to come here, she felt nervous.

He looked toward the curtained sliding glass doors. “I don’t want to have this conversation in here.” He nodded toward the bed as if it could overhear them. He switched off the lamp, then began opening the curtains. Beyond the glass, she could see the white ripple of waves as they rushed toward the shore. Sam snapped his jeans, then slid open one of the doors. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

She slipped off her sandals and dangled them from her fingertips as she followed him out to the patio. They climbed over the iron railing and crossed the grass to the beach where the air was dark and balmy, filled with salt and the rush and fall of the waves. A crescent moon bisected the ocean with a sliver of light. He took her hand. Yes. She’d needed that. Needed to know he wasn’t angry that she’d come.

“No babies tonight?” he asked.

“None. Last night, I delivered my doula’s first.” It had been a peaceful birth in the small candlelit bedroom Suzanne shared with her husband, Zeke, who had been by her side every minute. The infant with the big name, Cleveland Ezekiel Johnson, had slipped into Noelle’s hands with such ease for a first baby. “It went very well.” Now Emerson was talking about a home delivery. Being the midwife of a relative was frowned upon, but the thought of delivering her own niece or nephew made Noelle smile. No one—except Sam—would be any the wiser.

“You’ll be there for Tara and me when we’re ready,” Sam said, like a test. “Right?”

She focused on the way his hand felt in hers. “Sam,” she said, “you can change your mind. People do it. People realize they’re making mistakes that will impact so many people for the rest of their lives. You can—”

“Shh.” He squeezed her hand hard. “Please, just…don’t mess with my head, all right? I’ve thought about it inside out and backward these past couple of years, Noelle. You know that. You know I’ve wrestled with this and I’ve made a choice. Please respect it.”

“You love me,” she said.

He didn’t deny it. “There’s more to consider than love,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“I love Tara, too, and we’re better matched than you and I are. You know that. I want a house in the burbs. I want—”

“The white picket fence. The dog. The kids. I know you say that, but—”

“You’re one of the best people I know.” He interrupted her. “On the scale of incredible women, you’re up there with Tara. In some ways, you even top her. But she wants the same life I want, Noelle. Admit it to me. You don’t want to entertain a roomful of lawyers, do you? You don’t want to do the Wilmington social scene, the things I’ll need to do—my wife will need to do—for my career.”

She didn’t answer. It was all true. She didn’t want any of that, but she believed with all her heart that, deep down, Sam didn’t want it, either.

He stopped walking, turning to face her. She saw the moon—two little silver crescents—reflected in his eyes. “You’re a fantasy,” he said, “and Tara’s my reality. With you…I always feel as though if I touch you, my hand will pass right through you. Like you’re an apparition.”

She lifted his hand, slid it beneath her shirt to her bare breast. “Does this feel like an apparition?” she asked. She let go of his hand but he didn’t lower it. She felt his thumb graze her nipple and knew he was making a decision. She knew in her heart, though, it wasn’t a decision that would erase the wedding coming up in two weeks. He was making a decision for tonight. For right now.

He leaned forward, pressing his lips against hers. She felt his erection through his jeans, through her skirt. Right now was not what she’d come here for. She wanted forever. Yet as her nipple tightened beneath the touch of his fingers and her heartbeat thrummed between her legs, she forgot about forever. She would take whatever he would give her tonight. It would have to last all their lives, through his world of picket fences and expensive haircuts and clean, pressed suits and her world of patchwork furniture and middle-of-the-night runs filled with blood and birth. If tonight was all she could have of him, she would make it worth remembering.

They lay on their backs in the sand afterward, staring at the bowl of stars above them. They’d rolled her skirt up to form a pillow beneath her head and Sam rested his own head on his jeans. She could feel spray from the waves on her bare skin as she rolled toward him, running her hand across his chest. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He didn’t answer, but he sank his fingers gently into her hair. “I should feel worse than I do,” he said finally.

“You feel guilty for not feeling guilty?” She smiled.

“I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. You know, I’ve never cheated on Tara. In the seven years we’ve been together. Never.”

“Don’t use that word. Cheat. Please.”

“This…you understand this doesn’t change anything?” His chin brushed her temple as he spoke.

“It changes something for me,” she said. “It gives me a memory to hold on to.”

He curled a strand of her hair around his finger. “You could have any of a hundred men who want you,” he said. “Ian, for example.”

She ignored the comment. She knew Sam’s new law partner had a thing for her, but the attraction was one-sided. Ian was nice enough, good-looking in a clean-cut sort of way and smart as a whip. She’d considered sleeping with him, but thought that might be a mistake. He was the type who’d want more, and the truth was, if she was going to be with a man for anything long term, he would need to be a Sam clone, and Ian wasn’t.

“I don’t want you to worry about this,” she said. “About tonight. I’m not going to ask anything of you like this, ever again. If you feel sure you’re doing the right thing by marrying Tara, I’ll support that one hundred percent because I love you both.” She heard the crack in her voice, completely unexpected. Sam rubbed her shoulder. “I’ll go out with Ian a few times and give him a chance, okay?”

“Good,” he said. “You’ll make him a happy man.”

She sat up with a sigh and reached for her clothes. “I should go,” she said, pulling her blouse over her head. She stood and dusted the sand from her thighs as Sam began to dress. It was good she had done this, she thought. Yes, she’d betrayed one of her closest friends and she knew that would haunt her, but she’d needed to do it to let Sam go. Otherwise, she’d be mooning over him for years. Decades. And that could only have been more harmful to her friendship with Tara in the long run. Now she was finished, she told herself as she slipped into her skirt. This chapter of longing was closed.

She pointed toward the parking lot behind the Blockade Runner. “My car’s on this end of the lot,” she said.

He put his arm around her as they walked across the sand. His silence worried her, but once they reached her car he hugged her, holding her for a long time, and she pressed her hands flat against his bare back. “No regrets, Sam,” she said. “Please.”

He pulled away from her slowly, running his palm down the length of her arm before opening her car door for her. “Be well,” he said.

“You, too.” She sat down behind the wheel and, without looking back at him, drove away.

Her tears surprised her with how quickly they came. Her body convulsed with them as she drove and she could barely see the road in front of her. The night was inky black as she crossed the bridge to the mainland, and when she stopped at a red light she could see no other cars on the road at all. She pressed her hands to her face, wishing she could escape from her body.

Suddenly, the squeal of brakes filled her head and she opened her eyes to see headlights swerving toward her. Letting out a scream, she turned her wheel sharply to the left and stepped on the gas. The oncoming car caught her right bumper, spinning her car around and tossing her, unbelted, against the dashboard. She pressed hard on the brake and felt as though every muscle in her back snapped in two as her car jerked to a stop.

A man jumped out of the other car and began running toward her, shouting, waving his arms wildly in the air. She locked her car doors. Was he crazy? Furious? It took her a moment to understand what he was saying.

“You don’t have your lights on, asshole!” he shouted. “Where the fuck are your lights?”

No lights? God! What was wrong with her? Her hands shook as she flicked the knob for her headlights. She saw the man pull a phone from his pocket. The police. Jumbled thoughts raced through her mind, one of them rising quickly to the top: she didn’t want to have to explain to anyone what she was doing in Wrightsville Beach in the middle of the night.

She stepped on the gas pedal and took off across the intersection, speeding away from the man and his shouting, hoping she was disappearing into the darkness too quickly for him to be able to read her license plate number. When she was a few blocks away, she pulled into a deserted parking lot, turned off her car and sat very still, waiting for her heart to settle down. But as the beat slowed and steadied, the muscles in her back contracted into a knot that was tight and sharp and savage, and she knew that her betrayal of Tara was not all that would haunt her about this night.

30

Tara

Wilmington, North Carolina

2010

I hadn’t been in Sam’s office since before he died. Ian had brought two boxes of personal items to me a few weeks after his death and I wished he hadn’t bothered. The spare pair of sunglasses, a couple of business awards, framed photographs of Grace and me and other odds and ends—I would have just as soon not seen them. Now Emerson and I sat on the sofa in front of the windows in Sam’s old office waiting for Ian. Sam’s desk still had a monitor and keyboard on it, but nothing else. The only other things in the room besides the furniture were the floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with law books and three gleaming wooden antique file cabinets. They were the file cabinets Ian had slowly been making his way through as he tried to determine which of Sam’s old cases needed his attention.

“You want something cold to drink?” he asked as he walked into the office. “Water? Soda?” He had a legal-size manila folder in his hands. It was neither thick nor thin. The edges were worn as though it had been beaten up a little over time.

“We’re good,” I said. I knew we both just wanted him to get to the point.

Ian sat down in one of the leather chairs in front of Sam’s desk. “Well.” He looked at me—apologetically, I thought. “Noelle continues to surprise us.”

“Ian,” Emerson said impatiently. “What did you find?”

He held up the folder. “This was with Sam’s old cases. The name on the file is Sharon Byerton. It’s a made-up name, I’m sure.”

“Why a made-up name?” I asked.

“I’ve done it myself,” Ian said. “If I’m working with a client whose identity I want to protect from anyone who might stumble across the file, I’ll give it a false name. When I opened the folder, though…” He shook his head. He wore an expression of disbelief, as if he still couldn’t fathom what he’d found inside. He opened the file now and I could see a stack of the heavy, creamy sort of paper Sam used for legal documents. “Remember Noelle’s so-called ‘rural work’?” he asked.

We nodded.

“She wasn’t practicing midwifery then,” he said, “except maybe on herself.”

“What are you talking about?” Emerson asked.

“These are contracts,” he said, holding the papers in the air. “She was a gestational surrogate.”

“A…?” The words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.

“Five times. When she went away to do her rural work, she was actually in Asheville or Raleigh or Charlotte, finishing the last few months of a pregnancy and turning over a baby to that child’s biological parents.”

I couldn’t speak and Emerson seemed to have lost her voice, as well. It was too much to take in. Way too much.

“How can this be?” Emerson looked at me. “How can this possibly be? Why would she do this?”

“Oh…my…God,” I said slowly. “Are you sure?”

Ian leaned forward to hand us each a contract. I looked down at the pages of legalese. There were the names of strangers in the blanks marked genetic father and genetic mother. Noelle’s name in the blank for embryo carrier. I looked up at Ian. “Who are these people?”

He shook his head. “I have no information other than what’s in those contracts. The contracts are well drafted, but they’re not your typical surrogacy contract, not that I’ve seen a lot of them. Usually surrogates are married and have children and the husband would sign the contract also. Of course, that’s not the case here. She went into each contract prior to the in vitro fertilization, which I’m glad to see. She covered herself carefully. Or, I guess, Sam did. In each case, the parents paid all her expenses, of course, plus fifteen thousand dollars, which is low for this sort of thing, but I could see Noelle thinking that was just fine. She didn’t have many personal expenses.”

“We didn’t charge her much rent.” Emerson’s voice was husky.

“There’s the usual restrictions on the surrogate not interfering with the raising of the child or ever trying to assert parental rights. And there’s—”

“When did she start doing this?” Emerson asked.

“The first contract was signed in April 1998.” He cleared his throat and looked down at the contracts in his lap, and when he spoke again, his voice was thick. “Usually there’s something in a surrogacy contract about a psychiatric evaluation of the surrogate, but there’s no provision for that here, and I…” His voice trailed off and he lowered his head, his hand rubbing his chin, his eyes glistening behind his glasses. I felt so sad for him. I stood and crossed the room to lean over to hug him.

“She wasn’t right, Ian,” I said. “Something was off with her and none of us saw it.”

“I want to talk to some of these parents,” Emerson said. “At least the last couple. Can I do that?”

Ian lifted his head again and squeezed my arm in a little thank-you gesture as he regained his composure. “I’ll contact them and see if they’re willing,” he said. I stood next to his chair, my hand still on his shoulder. My own eyes had misted over, not for Noelle but for him, and I realized that I cared about him more than I’d thought.

“We missed her being pregnant,” Emerson said. “Five times!”

“The way she dressed, she could cover up a lot,” I said.

“Could this be why she and Sam were meeting at the restaurant in Wrightsville Beach?” Emerson asked.

“Possibly,” Ian said. “Although the last contract was from 2007 and she was forty-four when she died, so I think she was…finished. It would be very rare for someone to hire a surrogate her age.”

“Well, they hired her unmarried and without children,” I said as I sat down next to Emerson again. “How could Sam do this?” I asked. I was stunned by Sam’s involvement and especially by the fact that he’d known something like this about Noelle when the rest of us were in the dark. “Wasn’t this unethical of him? Shouldn’t he have tried to stop her?”

“He probably did,” Ian said. “I’m guessing he saw the contracts as the only thing he could do for her. It looks to me as though every i was dotted and t was crossed.” He held up the folder in his hand. “It bothers me that she had psychological problems none of us knew about, but if she was determined to be a surrogate and she refused to get therapy, I have to trust that Sam was protecting her interests the best way he knew how. Through the contracts…” He opened the folder again. “He has no notes in the file about any meetings he had with her, but that’s not uncommon,” he said. “I often toss those notes myself, especially if it’s about something sensitive. The only thing other than the contracts in here is this.” He held up the folder itself, open to the inside back page. From where I sat, I could see something written in pencil, but I couldn’t make it out.

“What does it say?” I asked.

“Just one word with a question mark,” Ian answered. “Penance?”

31

Noelle

Wilmington, North Carolina

1993

She sat in the lounge of the women and newborn unit at the hospital, waiting for Tara. She was heartbroken, but trying to hold it together because the waiting area was full of anxious families and kids and she didn’t want to cry in front of them.

She’d left Emerson and Ted in the recovery room, where Emerson was still blissfully groggy after the D and C. Her first pregnancy had ended just before the twelve-week mark, but she’d made it eighteen weeks this time and everything had seemed to be going so well. Noelle would not agree to be her midwife the next time. It was hard enough going through pregnancy loss with one of her patients. With Emerson, the sadness was too much for her.

Tara nearly burst into the lounge, all energy and worry. “I ran a red light,” she said after giving Noelle a hug. “Where is she?”

“In recovery. Ted’s with her.”

Tara sank into the chair next to Noelle. Her dark blond hair was pulled up in a messy ponytail and she wore no makeup, a sure sign she’d rushed out of the house. “I can’t believe she has to go through this again,” she said. “It was so bad the last time, Noelle. This is going to be so much worse. I’m afraid for her.”

She was right. After her first miscarriage, Emerson had sunk into a dark depression that lasted weeks. She’d been unable to work in Ted’s real-estate office, which she’d been doing since before they were married. Unable to shop for groceries or straighten the house. Some days, she couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning.

“It’s the hormones,” Noelle said. “Postpartum depression. She may need some medication to get through it this time. I asked Ted if I could move in for a while and he’s all for it.”

“Oh, fantastic!” Tara grabbed her hand. “That would be such a relief to know you’re there. I can bring meals over.”

“Good,” Noelle said. “We’ll take care of her together.” She shifted her weight in the chair. Her back was seizing up as it did regularly ever since the accident. Sometimes it was impossible to find a position that didn’t hurt.

Tara glanced toward the unit. “Do you think I can see her now?”

Noelle nodded and got to her feet. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll ask them to let you in.”

They walked through the hallway toward the recovery room.

“Her miscarriages are scaring me,” Tara said. “She takes such good care of herself and does everything right, and…I don’t think I could handle it.”

“Of course you could.” Noelle rested a hand on her back. “You’re tough. But let’s hope you never have to.”

She knew that Tara and Sam were already trying to conceive and she wished them nothing but success. Their wedding day, nearly eight months earlier, had been one of the hardest days of her life. She’d felt sick that morning and wasn’t sure she’d make it to the wedding at all, much less be able to be a bridesmaid. Her illness wasn’t physical, though. She’d been sick with self-disgust. Why did people get so stupid when it came to sex? Why was it so hard to just say no? When she’d realized that night in Wrightsville Beach that Sam wouldn’t give Tara up, why didn’t she say, “I understand,” and leave? Then she wouldn’t have this unrelenting back pain or this unrelenting guilt.

Most of all, she wouldn’t have destroyed one of the richest friendships she’d ever known. Now, Sam kept his distance. He went out of his way never to be alone with her. Even Tara had noticed that something was different. “Did you and Sam have a fight?” she’d asked her a few weeks after the wedding. She’d looked concerned, not wanting a rift between two people she loved. Tara was so guileless. So trusting when it came to Sam. Noelle had laughed off the question. “Of course not,” she said. Then she’d hugged Tara hard, thinking as she held her in her arms, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

She let Tara into the recovery room but didn’t go in herself. The nurses wouldn’t appreciate a crowd around Emerson’s gurney. Instead, she walked into the ladies’ room and swallowed a few of the pills she had stashed in her pocket. She leaned back against the cool wall and closed her eyes, anxious for the relief to kick in.

She’d told everyone a drunk driver had run a red light, crashing into her as she was on her way home after a middle-of-the-night delivery in Wilmington. Ian, whom she’d been seeing ever since Sam and Tara’s wedding, wanted her to sue, but she told him the incident had seemed so minor at the time that she hadn’t bothered to get the other driver’s name. She pleaded with him not to badger her about it. She wanted that night to go away.

A woman walked into the restroom and Noelle moved away from the wall. She washed her hands and left the room and walked straight through the corridor and the lounge and out to the parking lot. She needed to go home and throw some things in a suitcase so she could move into her sister’s house.

In her car, she felt the Valium and Percocet start to kick in. Thank God. She was taking more medication these days, playing around with the cocktail of drugs. She was careful, though, trying to find a balance between keeping her back pain to a manageable level and being able to function. She didn’t ever want to compromise her medical practice or put her patients at risk. She’d known drug-addled doctors and nurses and had vowed never to be one of them. She had more sympathy for them since her back injury, though. She’d tried acupuncture, Reiki, rest, heat, ice, but nothing worked as well as a nice healthy dose of narcotics. She tried to save them for those times she knew she wouldn’t be called on to catch a baby or manage a patient’s care. On those occasions, she worked through the pain. It was a pain she thought she deserved.

She took over the guest room at Ted and Emerson’s, dragging some clothes, her medical supplies, her heating pad and drugs and her logbooks with her. For the first time since leaving home eight years earlier, she felt part of a family. She cooked and cleaned and shopped and nursed her sister slowly back to life. She listened to Emerson talk about the lost baby, the plans and hopes she’d had for him—it had been a boy—how she’d allowed herself to imagine him starting school, graduating, marrying, having kids of his own. In Emerson’s imagination, he was musical and artistic, even though she and Ted were, to be honest, neither. He would have been kind and loving, though. Emerson was sure of that and Noelle didn’t doubt it. She listened to it all, thinking, My nephew, and she felt the loss herself.

She was the only midwife she knew who had no children of her own, and her dream of having a child, of creating her own family, was growing with every baby she delivered. That longing made her look at Ian with fresh eyes.

“I admire you,” he said to her in Emerson’s guest room one night. They’d just made love in the double bed, quietly, not wanting to be overheard. “The way you stepped in and took over to help Emerson and Ted.”

Ian not only admired her, he worshipped her, the same way a few other men had worshipped her over the years. Worship had never been much of a turn-on for her. Did she love him? Yes, the way she loved all her friends, and that would have to do. There were no Sam clones around and Ian would be a good father and a more faithful husband than she deserved.

“It’s easy to help Emerson,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder. “I love her. I just want to see her happy.”

“She and Ted seem good together.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think they are.” Ted was one of those guys who never talked about his feelings, but every once in a while Noelle would catch him doing something that touched her. The way he’d tenderly stroke Emerson’s cheek while they were watching TV, or the sad look in his eyes as he wrapped the unneeded car seat in plastic before storing it in the attic. Moments like that, she felt a hunger for something more than she had in her life.

“So, does living in this domestic harmony give you any ideas?” Ian teased her.

Usually, she would laugh him off. He’d already asked her to marry him a couple of times, but she’d told him it was ridiculously early to talk about marriage. Tonight, though, thinking about Ted and Emerson, how good they seemed together despite their very different personalities, she hesitated.

“Actually,” she said, “it’s nice.”

“Wow,” Ian said. “I didn’t expect that answer. So will you marry me?”

Now she did laugh, but she raised herself up on an elbow to look at him. “Do me a favor, Ian?” she asked.

He brushed a strand of her hair over her shoulder. “What’s that?”

“Keep asking me, all right?” She smiled. “One of these times, I just might surprise you.”

32

Emerson

Wilmington, North Carolina

2010

The night after Ian told us about Noelle’s surrogacy, I lay in bed, bone tired but unable to sleep. After leaving Ian’s office, I’d driven to Jacksonville for a too-quick visit with my grandfather, who slept the entire time I was there. That was just as well. I knew he was upset that he’d never gotten to spend time with Noelle and it hurt me to see his sadness and regret.

By the time I got home, Ian had left a number for the last woman Noelle had served as a surrogate. I was glad Ted and Jenny weren’t home yet. I sat at my kitchen table and dialed the number. The woman’s name was Angela and she sounded weepy as I explained who I was and why I was calling.

“The lawyer told me she killed herself,” Angela said. “I’m in total shock. We loved her so much. We wouldn’t have our two children if it wasn’t for her.”

“Did Ian explain that we didn’t know Noelle was a surrogate?” I asked.

“Yes. I guess that’s not a huge surprise to me, because she was a very private person. Rob and I didn’t know much about her life, either. We were nervous about using her in the beginning because she didn’t have kids of her own. They always say the surrogate should have her own family. But we’d spoken with another couple she’d been a surrogate for and they recommended her so highly, we felt confident going ahead with her.”

“So…” I was having trouble formulating my questions, even though I’d thought them through before dialing the phone, “where did she live when she was waiting to give birth?”

“When she was pregnant with our son, we put her up in a hotel. But by the time our daughter was conceived, we felt much more comfortable about the whole thing and she lived with us the last three months of her pregnancy. She was a huge help, actually.”

“Did she say why she did it?”

“She said it was her calling. That was the word she used. Her calling.”

“Did she ever seem like she was drugged to you?” I hadn’t expected to ask the question, but there it was, popping out of my mouth, and Angela didn’t answer right away.

“Why would you ask that?” she said finally. “It specifically said in the contract that she was to use no drugs without her doctor’s—and our—approval.”

“She had back problems and needed pain medication for a while and I wondered how she made out without it.”

“I knew about her back,” Angela said. “I knew she was in pain sometimes, but she just put up with it. Plus, she was with us 24/7 those last three months. We would have known if she was using something. I trusted her completely.”

“Did you think she was mentally stable?”

Angela laughed. “I would say Noelle was crazy in a stable way, if you know what I mean. I mean, she was lovably crazy. Not a psych case. Just…” She sighed loudly. “She loved what she was doing,” she said. “She was happy doing it. I’m absolutely certain about that. I’m so sorry you lost her. It’s hard for me to imagine her taking her own life.”

“Did she talk about her family?” I asked. “I know I’m badgering you with questions, but I—”

“No, that’s fine. I’d feel the same way if I suddenly discovered someone in my family had led a secret life. And yes, she talked about her sister—about you—a lot. She raved about your cooking and baking.”

“She called me her sister?”

“Yes. You are, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but I only learned that recently.”

“Wow. She always called you her sister. Unless she has some other sister.”

“Just me,” I said, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, Who knows what else she was hiding? “I have just one more question,” I said. “Did she ever mention a woman named Anna Knightly to you?”

“Anna Knightly.” Angela sounded as though she was mulling the name over. “I don’t think so. Was she another parent Noelle helped?”

I shut my eyes. Hardly, I thought. “No,” I said. “Just someone I’m trying to track down.”

Now as I lay in bed, all I could think about was Noelle and her secrets and I stared at the moonlight reflected on the ceiling. Ted was finally asleep next to me, but it had taken him a long time to get there. As bizarre as Noelle’s surrogacy seemed to me, it was a hundred times more so to Ted. He’d barely recovered from the realization that Noelle and I were sisters when I hit him with the real purpose of her “rural work.” We’d stayed up late, talking about it, but I didn’t think that either of us had fully accepted the truth by the time we went to bed. He didn’t know the half of it. I wished I could tell him about Anna Knightly. At the same time, I felt protective of Noelle. Ted was starting to make a face every time he said her name. I could only imagine his reaction if I told him everything else I knew about her.

Tara and I thought we’d figured out Noelle’s motivation: she’d stolen a child. Through surrogacy, she’d found a way to give one back. It was her penance. Yet, one child hadn’t been enough to absolve her for what she’d done. She’d had to give and give and give. The baby she’d accidentally killed and the baby she’d stolen—they must have haunted her every day of her life until she found a way to permanently lay them to rest. It made me so sad. I knew she’d wanted children of her own. She loved kids. She must have felt undeserving of ever having them. If only she’d let me know we were sisters. If only she could have confided in me. Maybe I could have helped her.

I kept picturing those surrogacy contracts and imagining Sam being a party to the whole thing. He’d known about the surrogacy. What else had he known?

I pictured Noelle’s record books, wondering if the identity of the woman whose baby had died was truly locked away somewhere in their pages or if we were way, way off in our search. I was beginning to think that the page she’d torn from the logbook held the answer we were looking for and that page no longer existed. We had no way of knowing who that patient might be. The Birth Center wasn’t going to give us the information—if they had it to begin with. Only if we went the legal route would they turn over their old records and Tara and I weren’t ready to go there. Part of me was slipping back into denial. I had to remind myself of the letter Noelle had written to Anna Knightly to remember that this whole mess was real.

I kept thinking about Denise Abernathy’s green-eyed blond kids. Denise’s daughter had been the last girl Noelle delivered. Lying next to Ted, wide-awake, I imagined Noelle desperately searching for a newborn baby whose eyes might turn green like her mother’s and older sister’s. Noelle had a sixth sense about eye color. She could always tell what no one else seemed able to—the color a baby’s eyes would eventually turn. I pictured her wandering through the hospital in the dead of night, lifting the eyelids of babies, checking their eyes for their color. The whole idea was insane and very, very bizarre. As bizarre as being a secret surrogate mother, five times over.

If only we knew the date Anna Knightly’s baby had been born, that would clinch it, right? We’d know then if Denise Abernathy’s green-eyed blonde daughter was the one. At the very least, we’d be able to see if Noelle had recorded the birth that had gone so horribly wrong. I sat up in bed with a start. Were birth records online?

I got out of bed. I’d find out right now.

Downstairs, I snitched one of the stuffed mushrooms I’d made for Suzanne’s party from the refrigerator and carried it to my office on a napkin. I nibbled the mushroom as my computer booted up. Then I dug around a little and found the birth records site for North Carolina, but I couldn’t get any information without both a last and first name.

I stared at the screen, thinking about Anna Knightly. She was the director for the Missing Children’s Bureau. She’d turned her own loss into a way to help others. I liked the very little I knew of her and I felt intense sympathy for her. How had she felt when she discovered her baby had simply disappeared? How had she gone on? And how could Noelle have done this to her?

I didn’t want to know too much about her personally; I only wanted to know when her baby disappeared. I wanted Anna herself to remain a faceless name. Once we knew who had her child, I’d let the authorities deal with her. I hoped I never had to meet her.

Yet without the help of the birth records, it seemed the only way to find a date for her baby’s disappearance would be to find her. I surfed over to the Missing Children’s Bureau. I’d briefly looked for her on that site before, thinking there’d be an in-depth bio of her someplace in its pages, but there wasn’t. It was a cramped site so full of information I didn’t know where to begin. There were resources for families and forms you could use to report the sighting of a child who might be missing and information on Amber Alerts. I dug around for a while and found some news reports in which Anna Knightly made statements related to specific cases, but nothing about Anna herself.

Then, finally, I got it.

How far back could I search for a missing child on the site? I opened the search form and entered the little bit of information I had: North Carolina. Female. Knightly. How many years missing? I picked thirteen, since Noelle had quit practicing twelve years ago and that was also the year she first became a surrogate. Then I clicked Go and quickly received the message 0 results found. Maybe the baby had a different last name.

I sat back in my chair and stared at the screen again, and that’s when I noticed the tiny green letters at the bottom of the page: site search. I clicked on them and the search box appeared. Finally! I typed Anna Knightly into the box, and suddenly, there she was—her photograph and a short bio. I wanted to turn away from her picture, but it was too late. I stared at her. She had a round face. Not overweight, but soft and sweet. Her light brown hair was chin length and wavy. Her eyes were large and very green. Green, like Denise Abernathy’s children. It was her smile that got to me, though. Not a broad smile, but the sort you’d wear for an executive portrait. Warm, confident, yet sober. I am all about serious business, her smile said. I’m all about finding your children.

I read the few lines of text below her picture.Missing Children’s Bureau director, Anna Chester Knightly, 44, has worked for MCB for ten years. Her infant daughter, Lily, disappeared from a Wilmington, North Carolina, hospital in 1994. She has one other daughter, Haley.

Oh! She had another daughter. I was so glad.

But 1994? That long ago? We’d definitely been off on our dates. I went back to the search form for missing children and changed my thirteen years to seventeen and up popped Lily Ann Knightly.

There was no picture—just one simple line.Lily Ann Knightly was born August 29, 1994, and disappeared from a Wilmington, NC, hospital shortly after her birth.

My heart gave a sudden thud in my chest. August 29, 1994. I rolled my chair back from the computer and walked to the long table by the windows where I’d stacked Noelle’s record books. I picked up the one labeled March 1994–November 1994. I opened it slowly, holding my breath as I turned the pages.

“No,” I said out loud when I came to the page I’d been looking for, although I’d known perfectly well what would be written there. At the top of the page was the patient’s name: Tara Vincent. The date was August 31, 1994—the date Jenny was born by C-section and Tara went into labor with Grace. For the first time, I thanked God that I hadn’t been able to have a home birth and Noelle had been nowhere near my daughter. I reread Noelle’s notes about Tara’s long and terrifying labor, ending with the perilous delivery early in the morning of September 1. I flipped the pages quickly, hoping Noelle might have made another delivery close to that date, but the next record was for a child born September 15 and that had been a boy. I turned back to Tara’s delivery and the pages upon pages of Noelle’s notes. I read the last few lines, searching for the place where Noelle’s handwriting would change from that of the careful, confident midwife to that of a frightened woman who’d accidentally dropped her friend’s child. A woman about to race to the hospital to find a replacement. I studied her notes, but she’d covered her tracks well. I saw her final sentence again—“She’s a beauty! They’re naming her Grace”—and I wondered if at that point she was referring to the Grace Tara had given birth to, or the Grace I’d known and loved all these years.

The Grace who belonged to none of us.

PART THREE

GRACE

33

Grace

I woke up at six and didn’t bother trying to go back to sleep. Cleve would be home for his mom’s party in just a few hours! In his email last night, he said a friend was giving him a ride and he thought he’d be home in time for lunch, though he didn’t say I should come over and have lunch with him. But he’d been emailing and texting me more over the past few days, like I was on his mind a lot now that he was coming home. He said, See you soon! in his text to me yesterday and I’d been dissecting those three words ever since. The exclamation point was my favorite part.

I had our day all planned out. If the weather was good we could go hang out by the Riverwalk and talk. Really talk for a change, like we used to. I was hoping, of course, that we’d get back together. It was a three-day weekend, so even if he wasn’t convinced by the end of today that we belonged together, I had two more days to work on him.

I was on Facebook around eight when my mother poked her head in my door. “You’re up?” She sounded surprised.

“I guess that’s a rhetorical question,” I said.

“Smarty pants.” She smiled at me. She’d been weird the past few days, and her smile wasn’t a real one. “Want to help me run errands?” she asked. “I have a million things to do to get ready for the party tonight.”

“I can’t, sorry. I have to write a paper. And Cleve’s coming home in a little while.” Why did I add that? I just couldn’t help myself. But now she was going to ask me all kinds of questions.

“You’re going to see him?” She didn’t think that was a great idea. I could tell. “Besides tonight at the party, I mean?” she added.

I shrugged like I didn’t care. “I guess,” I said.

“You can ask him about his classes and what he likes about Chapel Hill.”

I looked at her like she’d just been dropped on the planet from outer space. “I know how to talk to him, Mom,” I said.

“Well, what are you going to wear tonight?” She was in one of her twenty questions moods, and usually I’d just find a way to put an end to it, but I was so psyched about my dress that I decided to show it to her. Jenny and I went shopping Monday after school and I was in love with the dress I found. I pulled the hanger out of the closet and lifted the white plastic bag from the dress and she took in a breath, which was exactly what I did when I saw it in the store.

“Oh, Gracie, that’s so cute!”

Cute was not what I was after. I wanted sexy and sophisticated, but I knew what she meant. The dress was red, short and strapless. It was made out of a satiny material and had a silver belt at the waist. It might have looked cute on the hanger, but it was hot on me. Jenny swore up and down that it was.

“Thanks,” I said.

“What shoes will you wear?”

I pulled out the strappy red shoes. They’d just about killed my savings.

“Perfect,” she said. “Not too high. You’re smart. I haven’t even thought about what I’m wearing.” She glanced at her watch. “Have you eaten?”

“Not yet.”

“Want me to make—”

“No, thanks. I’m good.” I sat down at my computer again.

“You sure you don’t want to come with me? I’ll drop you off back here by noon.”

“I really have to do this paper, Mom.” I was glad she couldn’t see the Facebook page on my monitor from where she stood.

“Okay,” she said. “Have a good day.”

I didn’t write the paper, of course. I didn’t even try. I did some math homework, ate a banana, washed my hair, looked at my phone a million times to make sure it was turned on and exchanged comments with a bunch of Facebook friends I’d never met in person. At noon, I couldn’t take it any longer and I sent him a text message.

R u home yet?

In less than a minute, he wrote back. Got here hour ago. C u at party?

My heart dropped to my toes. Seriously. C u at party? Was he kidding? Why not now? We had all afternoon we could be together. We could be on the Riverwalk. Talking. Laughing.

I pounded the keys on my phone with my thumbs. Can u get together now? Im not working.

Helping Mom with something. Later.

I sat down on my bed and started to cry. I didn’t get it. I felt almost as bad as when he broke up with me. I tried to call Jenny, but she wasn’t picking up. Twitter started whimpering and I let him on the bed. He knew I was upset and he tried to squeeze his entire body onto my lap. I buried my face in his neck and sobbed.

Almost an hour later, I got up and looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Everything was red—my nose, my eyes, my cheeks. I had to pull it together or my face would be the same color as my dress at the party tonight. I straightened up, wet a washcloth and pressed it over my eyes.

I wasn’t hungry at all, but I was dying for coffee. I went downstairs to the kitchen and saw that there was still coffee in the pot, but of course it was cold. I’d nuke it. I opened the cupboard to look for a mug. Something was different. My favorite black mug was there and I took it out, but I knew that something was missing. Mom was always rearranging things and it was incredibly annoying. Then I got it. The purple travel mug I’d given my father! I loved that mug. I loved seeing that reminder of him every day. I opened the other cabinets one by one looking for it, but it was gone.

I would not cry. Would not. I’d just gotten my face to look okay again. Instead of crying, I grabbed the phone and dialed my mother’s number.

34

Tara

My van was full of balloons. The overly pierced young girl in the store asked me what colors I wanted and I told her to surprise me. Usually I would care, but my mind was going a thousand miles a minute between the preparations for Suzanne’s party and the discovery that Noelle had been a surrogate and that Sam had known about it all along—it was overwhelming. All those years, he’d known! My God. I knew he’d been dying to tell me. I was in awe of his ethics. I don’t know if I could have kept it to myself if I’d been in his place. I was glad that Noelle had turned to Sam to help her, though. I was glad that she’d trusted him that much.

All I could see in my rearview mirror was a sea of balloons, and I drove slowly toward the bakery where I was to pick up Suzanne’s birthday cake. Driving with a van full of balloons was no less dangerous than driving while texting, I thought to myself as I found a parking place a half block from the bakery. I put my van in Reverse and inched my way into the spot with only my side view mirrors to guide me.

My phone rang as I turned off the ignition and I figured Emerson had thought of something she needed me to pick up. I didn’t even glance at the caller ID.

“Hi, Em,” I said.

“How could you do it?” Grace shouted so loudly that I jerked the phone away from my ear. I didn’t know what I’d done, but I felt instant guilt, anyway.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Couldn’t you have left one single thing of Daddy’s in the house?” There was so much rage in her voice that she sounded like someone I didn’t know. What had I done now? I thought of Sam’s side of our closet, still so empty it echoed. Where his night table drawer had once been full of his books and pens and reading light, it now contained only a flashlight and some spare batteries. I’d donated his file cabinet. His desk drawers now held my stationery and school supplies.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The mug,” she said. “The purple travel mug I gave him.”

I pictured the mug. I saw myself reaching for it, an unattractive, no longer needed item taking up space in my cupboard. Why keep something we’d never use? I saw myself tucking it into the box for Goodwill. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, no. I…wasn’t thinking, honey. I saw it and you know how I can’t stand clutter and I forgot that—”

“It’s always all about you, isn’t it?” she shouted. “You can’t stand clutter so the mug has to go. You don’t even ask me what I think. If you hated it so much, you could have given it to me and I could have kept it in my room, because I don’t have a fucking problem with clutter, Mom! I don’t give a shit about clutter!”

She hung up and I sat there clutching the phone. She’d never spoken to me that way before, with that fury and certainly not with that language. I didn’t know she was even capable of speaking that way. I looked past the sting of her words and saw that she was right. I’d been selfish. And stupid. She’d bought that cup for Sam. I saw a painful reminder of him each time I looked at it, but she saw a treasured connection to someone she’d loved. I felt my throat tighten as I called her back, but she didn’t pick up. She’d said everything she had to say to me.

I pulled out of the parking lot. The cake would have to wait. I drove to Goodwill and got out of my helium-filled van and ran up to the front door. In the small drop-off room, a woman was handing a kitchen stool to the lanky, somber young guy who gave out the receipts.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I brought something here the other day and I need to get it back. Is that possible?”

“No, ma’am,” he said, taking the stool from the woman and setting it sideways on a pile of cartons. “No way.”

I looked through the open doorway behind him to the huge room where women wearing gloves were sorting through bags and boxes and all sorts of detritus. I tried to spot my lone small carton but knew it was a lost cause. Needle in a haystack.

I walked to my van and drove slowly and carefully back to the bakery, thinking all the while about what it had been like for Grace to open that cupboard and see that her last physical link to her father was gone. I felt myself inside my daughter’s skin. I could hardly stand how much it hurt.

I practically floated to Emerson’s house from my van as I held on to the cloud of balloons above my head. Her door was unlocked and I let myself in, freeing the balloons in her spacious living room.

“Em?” I called.

“In the kitchen.”

“I’m here. Just need to get some more stuff from the car.”

I made another trip to the van for the cake, which I carried to the side door that led into the kitchen. Shadow and Blue sniffed the air around me as I set the box on the granite counter. Emerson was washing a mixing bowl in the sink. “Hey.” She glanced up at me absently. “I made room in the fridge for the cake. Thanks for getting it.”

I moved the cake to the empty bottom shelf of her refrigerator. The other shelves were crammed with who knew what. Emerson’s refrigerator was never a pretty sight.

“I left the balloons in the living room,” I said. “I’ll spread them around a little later.”

“We have one small problem.” Emerson was scrubbing the daylights out of the mixing bowl and I knew she was stressing out. “Suzanne’s sister sent us a bunch of pictures and Jenny was working on making a collage out of them but she’s not feeling well and went up to bed. Do you have time to work on it? I had her put it in my office.”

“Sure.” I said. “Anything to keep my mind off…everything.” I smiled at Emerson, but she was too frazzled to smile back. “What’s wrong with Jenny?” I asked.

“She thinks she’s getting a cold.” She gave the bowl a final rinse and put it in the drainer. “She said she woke up with a sore throat. She helped me set out the plates and things on the table in the dining room and then crashed. I think she just doesn’t feel like helping. She’ll probably be fine for the party.”