The Midwife's Confession

I saw there was still some coffee in the pot and reached for it. “Okay if I help myself?” I asked.

“If you don’t mind heating it up.” She dried her hands on a dish towel, then walked past me to the pantry without so much as a glance in my direction.

“Are you all right?” I asked as I reached into the cupboard for a mug. I couldn’t help picturing my own cupboard, nice and orderly now without the purple travel mug towering above the others.

“I’m fine,” she said, pulling a package of napkins from the pantry. “I just—” she shook her head “—you know.”

“Yeah.” I put my arm around her shoulders. I knew about her conversation with the woman whose baby Noelle had carried. As strange as the revelations felt to me, they had to feel so much stranger to Emerson. We’d had little time to process everything and it was getting to both of us. Once the party was over, we’d be able to catch our breath. It was almost as though we needed to have another memorial service for Noelle. The first one was for a woman we didn’t really know.

“Well,” I said as I poured coffee into the mug, “I think I just screwed up big-time.”

She’d reached into a drawer for scissors and now held them above the napkins’ plastic wrapper. “What do you mean?” For the first time since my arrival, she was looking at me.

“I threw away Sam’s travel mug.” I put my cup into the microwave and hit the timer. “I forgot that Grace gave it to him. Or rather, I didn’t think about the fact that Grace gave it to him. She called me while I was getting the cake and chewed me out royally. I’ve never heard her so angry at me.”

Emerson cut the plastic film, then slipped the scissors back in the drawer. “It’ll blow over,” she said. “She’ll be fine.”

“Are you fine?” I asked. “You seem really upset.”

“I just…” She pulled the plastic from the napkins and appeared to be counting them.

“There’s twenty-four, I think,” I said. It would say right on the plastic sleeve, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

“I just want it to go well tonight,” she said.

“It will, sweetie.” The microwave dinged, and I took out my cup. “I’m a little worried about Grace and Cleve, though.”

“Do you think you could work on the collage?” she asked as though I hadn’t spoken.

“On my way,” I said. She was acting more like me than herself, worrying about the details, wanting perfection. I’d take care of the collage and get that out of the way and then see what else needed to be done.

I found the huge white cardboard collage about half-finished on one of the tables in Emerson and Ted’s shared office. I balanced the stack of pictures and the glue stick on top of the collage and carried the whole mess back into the kitchen so Emerson and I could talk while I worked on it.

She was taking wineglasses from a cabinet when I walked into the room and she looked surprised to see me.

“I thought I’d work in here,” I said.

“There’s so much more room to spread out in the office.”

“Too lonely in there,” I said as I rested the collage on the table and took a seat. I began looking through the photographs. There were a few pictures taken of Suzanne with Noelle over the years and I found them hard to look at. Is Noelle pregnant in this picture? I’d wonder. How about in this one?

There were tons of pictures of Cleve at different ages. Skin the color of pecans. His dad’s jet-black hair and his mom’s blue eyes. Handsome child. Even better-looking young man. “Cleve was the most adorable kid,” I said to Emerson.

She was cleaning water spots off the wineglasses with a dish towel and she didn’t seem to hear me. Grace once told me I didn’t need another person to have a conversation with—that I was content to hold up both sides of it on my own—but that wasn’t the case. I stood and carried a picture of Cleve over to the sink where Emerson stood, holding it in front of her so she didn’t have to put down the glass in her hands. “He’s about three here, don’t you think? Isn’t he precious?”

Emerson barely glanced at the picture. Instead, she suddenly set the glass and dish towel on the counter and pulled me into her arms, surprising me. She held me tight. Almost too tight.

“Hey,” I said, patting her back. “What’s wrong?”

“I love you,” she said. “Sorry I’m so preoccupied.”

I drew away from her. There were tears in her eyes and I took her hand. “Emerson, what’s the matter?” I lowered my voice in case Jenny or Ted were around. “Is it all the stuff with Noelle?” I whispered, then it hit me. “Your grandfather! Is he—”

“He’s okay,” she said. “I think I just have major PMS or something.”

“O-kay,” I said slowly, not sure I believed her. She never complained about PMS. “Why don’t you lie down? I can get everything ready.”

“Do you mind?” She looked so relieved. “I didn’t sleep well last night and I—”

“Go.” I pushed her gently toward the hallway. “Everything’s under control. Don’t worry.”

“All right,” she said. “I’m going.”

I watched her walk down the hall. She needed a good nap, I thought, and she probably wouldn’t be able to get one until tomorrow when the party would be behind us. She had too much going on. All the revelations about Noelle. Her grandfather in hospice. Suzanne’s party. No wonder she was a wreck.

I sat down in front of the pictures again. I’d have to finish the collage, then make sure everything was ready for the caterer. And then I’d go home and get dressed. I wanted to take a picture of Grace in her new red dress, but I had the feeling she wouldn’t let me. I could imagine the two of us in the van together as we drove back over here to Emerson’s. Me blathering. Her quiet and still angry. We needed to finish that argument before the party, I thought as I glued a picture of Suzanne and Noelle in the lower corner of the collage. We needed to be done with it.

I reached in my purse for my phone and hit Redial again, but she didn’t pick up. She wasn’t going to make this easy.

35

Noelle

Wilmington, North Carolina

1994

“I just want it to be simple,” Noelle said. She and Ian were sitting in her Sunset Park living room with Tara and Emerson, whom she’d enlisted to help plan the November wedding. She had no experience and definitely no skill in that department.

“It can be simple in style,” Ian said, “but I’d really like to have all of our friends there.”

Noelle knew she drove Ian batty with her desire for simplicity. She’d already nixed the idea of a church wedding—something he’d wanted—as well as renting a reception hall. The engagement ring he’d given her had weighed down her hand with its diamond and she’d insisted they exchange it for something far less ostentatious. He’d wanted to get married in August, but she’d put him off until November so Tara and Emerson would be completely recovered from having their babies. Tara was due in late August, nearly a month away, while Emerson was due in mid-September. They would be her bridesmaids. No maid of honor. She was always careful to treat them equally.

“Maybe we need to define what simple means for each of you,” Tara said. She sat on one end of Noelle’s old sofa, a notepad on her lap and excitement in her eyes, thrilled to be planning a wedding. Emerson sat on the other end of the sofa, and Noelle thought they looked like counterweights—two very pregnant women holding down her couch. Emerson was going to make it this time. Her pregnancy had tested all of their nerves with one problem after another, and although she wanted a home birth there was no way Noelle would take that risk with her. She’d assist at her hospital delivery, but one of the OBs would be in charge and that was definitely the way she wanted it. As long as everything continued to look good for Tara, though, her baby would be born at home.

“Simple to me means getting married in something comfortable,” Noelle said. “You know, just what I wear every day.”

Ian let out a small groan. He looked at Tara and Emerson. “See what I have to put up with?” His voice was so full of love that Noelle leaned over to kiss his cheek. He was a sweet guy. They would have a good marriage. She was determined to make that happen.

“So let’s get serious for a minute.” Tara clicked her pen above the notepad on her lap. “November’s too cold for an outside wedding, and since you don’t want to go the church route, Noelle, how about having it at my house? We have the room. Everybody might not be able to sit down for the ceremony, but there’s tons of space.”

“And I can do some of the cooking,” Emerson added, “and—”

“I don’t want you two to go to any trouble,” Noelle said. Being married in Sam’s house after all that had passed between them made her feel squeamish. “You’ll both have new babies, and trust me, any spare minute you have, you’ll want to sleep.”

“Oh, let us do it.” Tara brushed away the protest. “You know we’ll love every second.”

Ian looked at Noelle. “I like the idea of having it at Tara and Sam’s,” he said. “We can pay to have someone move furniture around and clean up before and after. And you can wear whatever you want.”

“No, she can’t,” Tara said. “Em and I will take her shopping. If I see her walking down the aisle in one of her old skirts, I’ll—”

“There’ll be an aisle?” Noelle interrupted. “I don’t want an aisle.” She didn’t. She didn’t want all that attention focused on her.

“It’s a figure of speech,” Tara said. “You can be married in front of our fireplace.”

It was a nice image, Ian and herself in front of the fireplace, their hands joined, their friends surrounding them. She was surprised when her eyes misted over at the thought. “Well,” she said to Tara, “why don’t you check with Sam about having it at your house,” she said. “Make sure it’s cool with him.”

“Oh, it’ll be fine with Sam,” Tara said.

Noelle wasn’t so sure. Her relationship with Tara had deepened during the months of prenatal care, and she’d discovered that the intimacy she always experienced with her patients was even more intense when that patient was a close friend. But things still felt a little strained between her and Sam. They were improving as he became more and more involved in the pregnancy, but she knew he had reservations about her being their midwife. Not that he didn’t trust her skills—he did—but he seemed uncomfortable being around her in any sort of emotional situation. He never said as much, of course; they didn’t talk that openly to each other anymore. It was that “not talking” that told her of his discomfort. She missed him and she blamed herself for the distance between them.

She was reminded of that night on the beach in every small twisting motion she made with her back and in the sleepless nights when her muscles tightened up and wouldn’t let go. She needed more medication to get through the day and—as long as she had no possibility of a delivery—even more at night. Her mounting dependence on the drugs scared her. Right now, right as she was sitting in her living room planning the wedding, she had a welcome Percocet buzz going on and she didn’t know how she would be able to function without it. How much of her pain was physical and how much emotional, she wondered, borne of a guilt and a longing that wouldn’t go away?

It was time to make it go away.

“You know what?” she said now to Ian. “I don’t care how we do it. Whatever you want is fine with me. I just want to be your wife.”

“Yay!” Emerson clapped her hands together.

“That’s the spirit!” Tara said, and jotted something down on her notepad.

Ian smiled at her, pink coins of surprise on his cheeks. “Would you consider the church, then?” he asked, pushing.

“Yes.” She gave him an emphatic nod. “You want the church? We’ll do the church.”

What did it matter? She wanted to marry Ian. She loved him as much as she knew how and she would do everything she could to make him happy. With any luck, in a couple of years they’d start their own family. For now, though, as she sat there with a man who adored her, her two best friends and enough drugs in her system to ease the ache in her back, she felt something approaching contentment, and that was more than she could ask for.

36

Emerson

Wilmington, North Carolina

2010

What the hell was I going to do?

I’d wanted Suzanne’s party to be special, but I was so wrapped up in what I now knew about Tara and Grace that as people arrived and began eating and drinking and laughing and talking, I felt as though I was experiencing the whole thing underwater. I saw faces, but they were blurry. I heard words but couldn’t make them out. I wanted the night to be over, and more than anything, I didn’t want to be alone any longer with what I knew. I moved through the rooms torn between heartache and indecision. What was I going to do?

People seemed to be having a good time. Everyone was gathering around Suzanne, making toasts and cracking jokes and celebrating her fifty hard-earned years, but even if my mind hadn’t been full of Grace and Tara, I would have been miserable. The party, with so many of the babies-in-need volunteers present, reminded me too much of the gathering after Noelle’s memorial service only three weeks earlier. Three weeks that felt like a lifetime. Things were moving too fast for me. I had the feeling that everything was spinning out of control.

Ted walked toward me where I stood between the living and dining rooms, a drink in his hand. He rubbed my shoulder. “Nice job, Em,” he said. “You holding up okay? I know you didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“I’m fine.” I smiled at him. At least, I hoped I was smiling. I had no idea what I was doing. I felt drugged by exhaustion and anxiety. I hadn’t slept at all the night before, and when I’d told Tara that afternoon that I wanted a nap, it had been a lie. I’d only wanted to get away from her. I couldn’t look at her. It was like knowing your best friend was going to die very soon and you could do nothing to stop it and nothing to warn her.

I was kicking myself for digging into Noelle’s past. For not tossing out that carton of cards and letters like Ted had suggested. I could still do it. Throw away the letter, the articles, the record books. I could make this nightmare go away. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut. But I knew I could never live the rest of my life with this secret.

Grace and Tara had arrived early so that Tara could help me put the finishing touches on everything. There’d been a sheet of ice between the two of them and I sensed Tara’s frustration over not being able to break it. Obviously, Grace hadn’t forgiven her for… What had Tara done? Thrown away Sam’s mug? Oh, that felt like such a small thing. Such a tiny, inconsequential thing. Yet Grace was still angry. She’d barely said hi to me before running upstairs to Jenny’s room, while Tara met with the caterer and the bartender and I moved woodenly through the house, pretending to be busy.

Now the kids—Cleve, Jenny and Grace—were all upstairs. They’d put in just enough time with the adults to be polite before disappearing. Jenny was sniffling with the hint of a cold, but seemed otherwise fine, though I knew she was upset Devon wasn’t there. He was traveling with his family for the long weekend. Cleve had grown even more handsome in his month and a half away from home, if that was possible. But it was Grace I’d had my eye on, of course, as I examined her features, searching for a trace of Tara or Sam in them. She looked beautiful. I’d never thought of that word with regard to Grace before. Adorable, yes. But beautiful? Yet her strapless red dress hugged her body perfectly. It wasn’t provocative, but it exposed the gentle slope of her small breasts and Cleve’s gaze kept darting in that direction. Her hair was a thick, sleek curtain of silk down her back, and she was wearing smoky eye makeup. Not too much, but enough to alter her features. Her eyes had always been unusual. They were brown like Tara’s, but when you looked closely, you saw that they were filled with jewel-like splinters of jade. Whatever clever thing she’d done with her makeup tonight made her eyes seem greener than ever.

Suddenly, she didn’t look like Grace at all and I was upset as I tried to find the girl I loved in this new young woman. I used to think I could see Sam in her, more in her mannerisms than in her facial features. She had that same shy smile that had seemed affable and warm on Sam but made Grace look unsure of herself. Seeing her insecurity as she tried to talk to the adults at the party, the ones she didn’t know well, tore at my heart. This girl was part of us and we loved her. We’d raised her, all of us. There was no way we would let her go. No way I could allow Tara to lose her daughter right after losing her husband. She wouldn’t lose her, would she? Certainly not physically. Grace couldn’t be taken away from her mother at the age of sixteen. Although, what did I know about the legalities of such a bizarre situation? I didn’t know, and that scared me. On top of that, I thought of how Tara would feel when she realized that the baby she’d given birth to had died. What had Noelle done with that baby? I didn’t want to think about that baby girl, forgotten and unmourned.

I could keep it all to myself, I thought again. Reveal nothing. Grieve for Tara’s baby alone. Keep the truth about Grace to myself. Yet even as I considered making that choice, I was searching the rooms for Ian. I needed to share this burden with someone who cared about Tara—and I knew Ian did. Someone who’d understand the legal implications.

I spotted him chatting with Tara and a few other people in the dining room and I kept my eye on him until he moved toward the makeshift bar, where I was able to corner him alone.

“There’s something I need to talk to you about,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “About your conversation with Angela?” he asked.

“Who?” For a moment, I couldn’t even remember who Angela was. “Oh…no. It’s something else, but I can’t talk about it here. Could you stop over tomorrow sometime? Early afternoon?” Ted would be showing houses and Jenny would no doubt be out with Devon or Grace.

“Can it wait, Em?” he asked. “I’m going out of town tomorrow night and I’m a little swamped.”

I shook my head, and he must have seen the tears beginning to well in my eyes.

He touched my arm. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

“And please don’t mention it to Tara.” I glanced nervously over my shoulder at the partyers in the room, hoping I wasn’t being overheard.

Ian was frowning. “What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow.” I stepped away from him, letting myself be pulled back into the throng. There, I thought. A decision. Finally.

Yet I felt no relief at all.

37

Grace

Cleve was different. How could somebody change so much in a month and a half? Seriously. He even looked different. When he walked into the party with Suzanne, I felt like I didn’t know him. I was sure he was taller and his face was a different shape or something. He walked right over to me, though, and gave me a hug.

“You look great,” he said, and the one thing that hadn’t changed at all was the way he smelled. I wanted to hold on to him and just breathe.

After staying at the party for a while, Jenny, Cleve and I all went upstairs and hung out in the bonus room talking. It felt almost like it used to when we were all just friends, except that I was having trouble thinking of things to say. Jenny and I showed him the stuff for the babies program, including the layette bags I’d learned how to make, and he said it was cool we were doing that but I could tell he was bored. He talked about school a lot and he’d totally gotten into basketball and the Tar Heels.

“I want to go to UNC,” Jenny said. “Chapel Hill would be so cool.” She and I were sitting on the futon, our shoes off. My dress was fine for standing around in but definitely not fine for sitting and I kept having to tug the skirt down and the top up. Jenny’s dress was loose and really cute, but she looked terrible. She was getting a cold and her voice croaked and she had a bunch of tissues wadded up in her hand.

“You can’t get into Chapel Hill if you don’t have a clue what you want to do with your life, Jen.” Cleve was sprawled out on the beanbag chair. He’d picked up one of the pacifiers from the baby stuff and was tossing it from one hand to the other. “You’re Miss Popularity, but your grades suck, am I right?” he asked.

“Go to hell.” Jenny laughed. “I could get in if you could.”

“I had a 5.2 GPA,” he said.

“You’re half-black,” Jenny said. “That’s why you got in.”

I kicked her leg with my bare foot. “You’re so rude,” I said. It was practically the first words I’d said since we’d come upstairs. Why did I feel so stupidly shy around him all of a sudden?

Cleve grinned. “It probably didn’t hurt,” he admitted.

“I have time to figure it out,” Jenny said. “All I know is I want to go into a helping profession.”

“What the hell is a helping profession?” Cleve asked. “You mean like a nurse?”

“Or a doctor, you sexist asshole.” Jenny laughed again. They’d always talked this way to each other. “Or a teacher or a counselor. Something that helps people, unlike architecture that only helps buildings.”

“God, you are ignorant,” Cleve said. “Who do you think lives and works in buildings?”

I was watching his hands as he tossed the pacifier from one to the other. I knew how it would feel to have him slide those hands up my thighs and under my skirt. Seriously, if Jenny hadn’t been there I would have stood and unzipped my dress and been all over him. Well, maybe not. But that’s what I wanted.

“At least Grace has some ambition.” Cleve caught me totally off guard by mentioning my name. “How many people do you know who can write as well as she can?”

“Yeah, but it’s hard to make money writing,” Jenny said.

“Hard but not impossible. And she’d be doing something she loves and that’s what matters.” They were talking about me like I wasn’t there, but I didn’t care. He was smiling at me. A really good smile. He’s still into me, I thought. I wanted Jenny to disappear. I could talk to him much more easily if it was just the two of us.

Cleve tossed the pacifier high in the air with one hand and caught it with the other. “Let’s go to the park,” he said, standing.

Yes, the park! We’d spent so many evenings there. We’d had sex there for the first time the night before he broke up with me. I’d always worried there’d been some connection between the two things: sex and the breakup.

“That’d be cool.” Jenny got to her feet.

“I’ll catch up,” he said, heading for the hallway. I guessed he wanted to use the bathroom. I grabbed Jenny’s arm before we started down the stairs.

“Could you stay here, Jen?” I asked. “Please? I’m sorry. I just need to talk to him alone.”

She looked surprised, but only for a second. “No prob,” she said. “I feel like crap, anyway. Tell him my mom asked me to help with something.”

“You’re the best,” I said, hugging her.

“Just—” she wrinkled her nose “—don’t get hurt, okay?”

I was already halfway down the stairs. “I won’t,” I said. The thought of getting hurt wasn’t even on my radar.

I waited for him on the front lawn and saw him walking down the driveway. He’d come out the back door, probably to avoid all the people in the living room.

“Jenny’s got to help Emerson,” I said when he was close enough to hear.

“Cool,” he said, but I could tell by the way he said it that he meant “okay,” not “that’s great.” We headed toward the park, walking in and out of the pools of light from the streetlamps. “Jenny should probably be with us, though,” he said after a minute. “Why?”

“Just…not a good idea for you and me to be alone together.”

I laughed. “You think we need a chaperone?”

“Actually, yeah. Especially with how hot you look tonight.”

Oh, God. “Thanks,” I said.

“Seriously. I was looking at you tonight thinking what an asshole I was for breaking up with you.”

Did he want to get back together? I nearly asked him, but I was afraid of pushing my luck. “Yeah,” I said. “You were.”

“It was the right move, though, Grace,” he said. “I mean, you look amazing tonight, but I’d only hurt you if we got back together. I’m three hours away and I want to be able to get to know people without feeling guilty about it.”

“Other girls, you mean.” We’d had this conversation before.

“Girls. Guys. New people.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I just need to be free for now.”

“I know all this,” I said. “Let’s not talk about it.” Talking about it now only reminded me of how much it hurt when we discussed it the first time. “I get it. We don’t need to go all over it again.”

“Good,” he said. Neither of us said anything for a couple of minutes. We’d gotten to the park entrance and headed toward the playground as if we were on autopilot. I was honestly having trouble thinking of things to say to him that had nothing to do with us getting back together. Before everything fell apart, I could talk to him pretty easily and now I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him that wouldn’t end up with me crying.

He sat down on one of the swings, and I took off my shoes and sat on the swing closest to him. “I didn’t care if we had to be long distance,” I said before I could stop myself.

“Grace,” he said, “don’t start.”

“You could even go out with other girls, as long as you didn’t…you know. I know you need to make friends and stuff.”

“Look,” he said, “who knows what’ll happen in the future? But for now, we really need to experience the rest of the world. Both of us. Until we get to know lots of other people, how can we ever know who’s the right one for us?”

I was speed-reading between the lines. I heard him say, You’re the one I want, but I need to be able to say I’ve gone out with other girls so when I come back to you, I know for sure.

Neither of us was swinging on the swings. We were just holding the chains, pushing ourselves around a little with our feet in the sandy pit beneath us. Suddenly, I couldn’t stand the physical distance between us any longer. I stood and walked over to his swing. I knew how to do this. I knew how to change everything in less than a minute. I held on to the chains right above his hands and leaned forward to kiss him. He didn’t resist at all. I knew he wouldn’t, and when I finally lifted my lips from his, it was only to reach down and touch his hard penis through his pants. He caught my hand, more to hold it there than to pull it away. But I stepped back, hiked up my dress and slipped my thumbs under the top of my panties.

“Oh, Gracie, don’t,” he said, but he didn’t mean it, and when I climbed onto the seat—onto him—he was every bit as lost as I was.

38

Grace

“I don’t want to go to church today,” I told my mother as we ate breakfast the morning after the party. At least, she was eating breakfast. Oatmeal and bananas. I was too wired to eat the toast on my plate.

“Oh, come with me, honey,” she said. “I have a solo today.” She was already in her church clothes—tan pants, white blouse, blue jacket with white-and-blue-checked scarf around her neck. I was still in my pajama bottoms and T-shirt.

“I’m really tired,” I said. “I just want to stay home, okay?” She looked disappointed—maybe even hurt—but I never really liked going to church. I hated afterward when you were supposed to stand around and talk to people. Of course, that was Mom’s favorite part. The only thing that made it okay was that Jenny was usually there. I was sure she’d be staying home today because she was sick, plus I needed to wait for Cleve to call. I wanted to get together with him before he left. Even though it was a three-day weekend, his friend needed to go back tonight and Cleve had no other ride, so he was stuck.

I’d called Jenny late last night to tell her how great things went with him.

“Are you back together?” she’d asked. Her voice was so hoarse I could hardly hear her.

“We didn’t specifically get into that,” I’d said. Last night had been about action, not conversation. I smiled now as I nibbled the corner of my toast, remembering my mother’s words from a couple of weeks earlier: you need to take action. Well, Mom, I did and you were right.

Omigod, it had been so good! Cleve kept saying, “Holy shit!” after it was over. He was holding me and kissing my hair and it was just the most amazing night.

“How did it go with Cleve last night?” my mother asked, and I jerked my head up. It was like she was able to hear my thoughts. What did she know?

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Just…seeing him.” She sipped her coffee. “I worried it’d be hard for you.”

“It was no big deal,” I said. “We’re good.”

She was looking at me like she wasn’t sure she believed me, and I stood to carry my plate to the counter and get away from her eyes.

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “What did you think of the party?”

“It was nice.” I threw my toast in the trash beneath the sink.

“I still feel bad about the travel mug, Gracie,” she said.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I wasn’t ready to let her off the hook on that one.

She stood and looked at her watch. I couldn’t wait for her to leave. I was worried Cleve would call while she was still home. My phone was on the counter and I kept looking at the display, waiting for it to light up.

“I have a meeting with the choir committee late this afternoon,” she said. “We’re meeting at Port City Java to plan the music for the rest of the year. Do you want to come? You could do your homework there and then we could grab something to eat.”

I didn’t understand how she could even look at Port City Java when that was the last place my dad had ever been. “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m probably just going to hang out with Jenny.” I rinsed my hands and reached for a paper towel. I couldn’t tell her I’d be hanging out with Cleve. That would start a whole new bunch of questions.

“Could you clean your bathroom, please?” she said as she headed for the door. “It’s looking pretty bad.”

“All right,” I said. I just wanted her to go.

At ten-thirty, I carried my phone to the living room and laid down on the sofa. He should be up by now. I texted, U up yet?

A few seconds later, he replied. On my way to CH.

What? I sat up, staring at the words. U said tonite! I typed, then waited, my fingers gripping the phone.

Friend needed go back early. Sorry.

I stared at the display. Screw texting! I dialed his number.

“Hey,” he said when he picked up.

“I can’t believe you just left without letting me know!” I said.

“Listen, Grace,” he said. “I’m sorry about last night.”

“What do you mean, ‘sorry’?”

“I really shouldn’t have… I took advantage of you.”

“No, you didn’t! I wanted to do it.”

“I know you did, and I took advantage of that fact.”

“Cleve! I—”

“You wanted to do it because you want us to be together again, but that’s not what I want.”

“Yes, you do,” I said.

“Nothing’s changed, okay, Grace? Everything I said about us needing to see other people…about being free… It’s still all true.”

“Cleve!”

“Look, you know I care about you a lot, right?”

“Yes.”

“I always will. No matter what happens, okay? But I screwed up by emailing and texting you after we broke up.”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought it would be okay,” he said. “I didn’t want to, like, cut you off cold turkey, but I think all the contact made you feel like we’re not really broken up. We need to chill on being in touch with each other, at least for a few months.”

A few months? The thought of not being able to talk to him felt like one more death. I started to cry. I tried to hide it at first, but I couldn’t speak and he knew. My life was totally empty. No Daddy. Jenny spending more and more time with Devon. Now no Cleve. He’d been my lifeline.

“Grace, don’t,” he said. “Come on. I’m sorry, but this is the right thing to do. I should have done it sooner. My buddy says it’s like taking off a Band-Aid. I should have done it fast instead of bit by bit. It’ll hurt like hell for a few minutes, but better than… I think I’ve been leading you on, staying in touch.”

“And screwing me last night!”

“Don’t talk about it like that.”

“That’s all it was to you, though. That’s what you’re saying.”

I heard him let out a big, frustrated-sounding sigh. “This is pointless,” he said. “I don’t know how to end things with you. We have to just stop. Starting right now, as soon as we hang up, no more texting or anything. It’s the best way for you to start living your life without me.”

“Because you want to live your life without me,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “Right now, I need to.”

I hung up, then speed-dialed him right back, but he didn’t pick up.

I texted him. Sorry I hung up. I waited, staring at the black display on my phone. Nothing. He wasn’t going to answer me.

I remembered how amazing it had been with him the night before. When he was with me, he wanted me. The second he was away from me, though, he was influenced by his stupid friends.

I had to see him.

I would take action.

39

Tara

Grace was in the kitchen when I got home from church. She sat at the table with a mug of coffee, her phone in front of her.

“How was your solo?” she asked.

I didn’t even think she’d heard me when I mentioned the solo earlier. “It went well,” I said. People had told me I sounded wonderful, and I’d forgotten how it felt to fill that beautiful space with my voice. But I’d felt empty inside and it wasn’t until I was driving home that I realized why: Sam wasn’t there. He always said my singing moved him. Not in so many words, but I knew how he was feeling by the way he’d hold my hand when I came back to the pew.

“When are you going out?” I asked. She was wearing cropped pants and a long-sleeved striped T-shirt and her hair was damp.

“In a little while,” she said. “I cleaned my bathroom.”

“Excellent!” I leaned over to give her a hug and her cool, damp hair stuck a little to my cheek. It was rare for me to only have to ask her once.

She folded her hands on the table, pressing them together so hard that her knuckles were white.

“Mom, listen.” She looked up at me. “I know you’re going to say no right away, so just listen to everything I say before you react, okay?”

It seemed like the longest sentence she’d said to me in months.

“Okay.” I leaned back against the counter. This was good. I would not say no right away. I’d let her talk.

“I’m going to Chapel Hill this afternoon. For the night. I—”

“Chapel Hill? Today? Why?”

She gave me her frustrated look. “There’s this girl,” she said. “She’s a graduate student and Jenny knows her and she—this girl—wants to see some friends in Chapel Hill, but she doesn’t have a car, so she’ll go with me and be my supervising driver and I’ll come back tomorrow.”

I was, for once in my life, speechless. Grace was terrified to get behind the wheel of a car and I was just as terrified to have her there. “Well, first of all,” I said, “you can’t go.”

“Mom, I told you not to just react!” She pressed her hands together even harder and her eyes were wide, imploring me. “Listen to the whole explanation,” she pleaded.

“Does this have to do with Cleve?” I asked, although that made no sense. Cleve was home for the weekend so why would she want to go to Chapel Hill?

“Yes,” she admitted. “He had to go back today and I absolutely have to see him. Plus, I want to see UNC, too, because I’ll probably be applying there.”

I knew that was bullshit. She might be applying there, but this sudden need to see UNC was such a weak excuse that even she knew it, and she turned her head away, unable to look me in the eye.

“You know that doesn’t make sense, Grace,” I said. “If you want to see Cleve, at least be honest with me and don’t make up some nonsense about wanting to see UNC all of a sudden.”

She flattened her hands on the table. “Cleve didn’t realize he had to go back early today and we didn’t get to finish talking last night and he asked if I could come.”

“Are you two back together?”

I could see her trying to decide how much to reveal to me. “He’s mixed up about us,” she said. “He thinks we should stay broken up, but we need to talk about it more and didn’t get the chance.” She frowned up at me. “I’m upset, Mom! I need to talk to him in person.”

“And where exactly would you stay?” I asked.

“With Jenny’s friend.”

“What’s her name?”

“Elena.”

“How does Jenny have a friend who’s a grad student?”

“She was… I don’t know. A neighbor or something. Do you want to talk to her? I can—”

“No, because you’re not going.”

“What if I let Elena drive instead of me?”

“No, Grace. I’m sorry you and Cleve are still struggling, but you’ll have to talk it out on the phone. If you want to go to UNC sometime in the future, we’ll plan it ahead of time. You’ll have to show me you’re comfortable driving first and—”

“Elena can drive.”

“This is too half-baked a plan, all right? You can’t go. I’m sorry, but this is a nonnegotiable.”

She sprang out of her chair. “You don’t understand!” she said, and in an instant, tears had filled her eyes.

“Then help me understand.” I caught her shoulders and held on tight as she tried to squirm out of my grasp. “Why can’t you and Cleve resolve this on the phone?”

She pried my hands from her shoulders. “I just wanted to go, that’s all!” She turned and headed for the stairs.

“Grace!” I called after her. “Don’t run off like that. Talk to me!”

But her footsteps skittered up the stairs and I lowered myself to a chair. I’d blown it again, yet I didn’t know what I could have said or done differently. This is normal, I told myself. Mothers and daughters fight.

I touched my cheek where I’d pressed it against her hair. I wanted to feel that sweet damp hair against my skin again. It had reminded me of when she was little and I’d hold her and rock her and she was so happy in my arms.

A long, long time ago.

40

Emerson

My plan was not going well so far. I hadn’t counted on Jenny feeling too sick to go out that afternoon, so I was anxious as I stood by the living room window watching for Ian’s car. The sky was gray and thick with clouds. We were going to get a downpour soon. In my hands I clutched Noelle’s record book and the thin file folder with her letter to Anna and copies of the information I’d printed from the Missing Children’s website.

I left the window for no more than a second to take the tray of leftover spanokopita out of the oven, and when I returned I saw his car out front but no sign of him, and I knew he was already heading up my driveway toward the side door.

People always just walked in my kitchen door without knocking, so I raced through the house to head him off, opening the door just as he was about to walk in. “Jenny’s home,” I whispered. “I was hoping she’d be out, but she’s sick, so just…play along with whatever I say.”

Ian frowned. “What’s going on?” he asked.

I put a finger to my lips. “I’ll tell you—”

“Hey,” Jenny said from the doorway to the kitchen. She was still wearing her pajama shorts and a tank top and her hair stuck out on one side.

“Hi, Jenny,” Ian said. “You’re not feeling well?”

“Too much wild party for me last night,” Jenny rasped, rubbing her throat. She gave me a confused what’s-Ian-doing-here? sort of look.

“Ian and I have some issues to talk about related to Noelle’s estate,” I said. I thought she was looking at the book and file in my arms with suspicion, but that might have been my paranoia. “What can I get you, Jen?” I asked her. “Some tea with lemon and honey?”

“I’m just going to crash again,” she said.

“Good idea. Want some juice to take up with you?”

“Yeah. Maybe.” She headed for the refrigerator, but I beat her to it. I set the record book and file on the kitchen table and quickly poured a glass of orange juice. Ian stood quietly next to the island, and I knew he didn’t know what was safe to do or say. I handed the glass to Jenny.

“Thanks,” she said. “See you all later.”

“She sounds miserable,” Ian said as we watched her head for the stairs.

“I know.” I moved the spanokopita from the baking pan to a plate. “We can nibble party leftovers,” I said, setting the plate on the kitchen table.

“Your hands are shaking,” Ian said, and then he lowered his voice. “Is this really about Noelle’s will or the…other things we’ve been talking about with regard to her?”

“Neither.” I rested my hands on the island and let myself simply breathe in and out for a moment. “I’ll tell you in a minute,” I said finally, glancing toward the hallway and the stairs. I’d really wanted no one home for this conversation. Especially not a sick kid who might need me. I motioned to the table. “Have a seat,” I said. “I have coffee? Iced tea? I can brew decaf if you like. Or you might actually need a glass of wine when I tell you what I have to say.”

“Coffee’s good.” He lowered himself to one of the kitchen chairs, his eyes never leaving my face.

I poured him a cup, then sat down at the end of the table, glancing toward the hallway again.

Ian looked at the book and file on the table, but didn’t touch it. “What’s this?” he asked.

I let out a long breath. “I’ve opened a gigantic can of worms and I don’t know how to get them all back in the can,” I said quietly. “I thought of just keeping it to myself, but I can’t. I don’t know who else to talk to.” I pressed my fingers to my temples. “I need your help to know what to do.”

“It’s a legal matter?” he asked.

“Yes and no.” I pulled out the typed letter Noelle had written to Anna and set it in front of him. The color drained from his face as he read it.

“Holy…” He looked up at me. Shook his head. “What’s next? I mean, seriously. What the hell is Noelle going to dump in our laps next? And who is Anna?”

I explained how I’d stumbled across the letter and how Tara and I finally figured out Anna’s identity. “But to answer your question about what’s next, I can tell you exactly what’s next.”

He looked as though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

I leaned toward him. “I believe the baby Noelle dropped was Tara’s,” I said quietly.

He jerked back as if I’d stung him. “What the… Why would you think that?”

“I found the date Anna Knightly’s baby disappeared on the Missing Children’s website,” I said. “Or, at least, the date she was born. The only baby Noelle delivered during that time was Grace. Or the baby who…the real Grace.” I pulled a sheet of paper from the file on the table. “This is from the Missing Children’s website. It says that Lily Ann Knightly was born on August 29, 1994, and disappeared from a Wilmington, NC, hospital shortly after her birth.”

He still wore his frown as he looked up from the paper. “Wasn’t Jenny born around the same time?”

“Jenny was born on the thirty-first and Grace on September 1, but I had Jenny in the hospital and Noelle wasn’t involved at all. Tara was in labor while I was having a C-section.”

Ian looked up at the ceiling. “I distinctly remember the night Grace was born,” he said. “Noelle and I were engaged back then, remember?”

I nodded.

“She called me a few times from Sam and Tara’s, telling me how rough going it was. She was really worried. She’d talked about getting Tara to the hospital, but in the end, it worked out all right.” He abruptly shook his head. “This doesn’t make any sense, Emerson,” he said. “Tara would have known if another baby was suddenly substituted for hers.”

“I don’t remember it all that well since I was busy having a baby myself, but I do remember Tara telling me she was so zonked after the delivery that she barely remembered even holding Grace until the next morning.”

“But Sam was there,” Ian said. “He would have been awake and alert and known if his baby was suddenly dead.”

“Don’t say it like that.” I shivered.

“Well, that’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it?” Ian sounded suddenly angry. I wished he would lower his voice. “Noelle killed a baby and somehow got rid of it and then she came up with this—” he waved at the letter “—this lamebrain plan and went to the hospital and found an appropriate substitute and brought it back and all that supposedly happened when? While Sam and Tara were sleeping on the most exciting night of their lives? It’s hard to swallow.”

“We know it happened, though,” I said. “We have it in Noelle’s own words.”

“Maybe there were babies Noelle delivered that she never recorded in her logbook,” Ian suggested.

“Then I think there would have been torn-out pages and there are none from 1994.”

“You and Tara should have come to me right away with this,” he said.

“We… Honestly, Ian. We had no idea how deep this was going to get. I think we were hoping we’d find out it was all a mistake somehow.”

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “How much of this does Tara know?”

“She has no idea it could be Grace,” I said. “Noelle quit practicing in 1998, so we naturally assumed the patient whose baby was…lost was from around that time.”

Ian reached for the logbook. “Let me see her record of Grace’s birth,” he said.

I had the pages marked and I opened it for him. I watched as he scanned the account of Grace getting stuck during Tara’s labor. “Posterior arrest,” Noelle called it, and it was followed by hours of manipulation and excruciating pain that put me in awe of both Noelle and Tara. Reading the account, I’d thought Noelle had been a miracle worker to be able to deliver her at all.

“This sounds ghastly.” Ian winced. “But there’s nothing here about a dropped baby,” he said.

“She didn’t write that part, obviously,” I said. “She falsified what happened. In case you haven’t figured it out by now, my sister Noelle was pretty good at lying.”

“Where’s the baby?” Ian asked. “Tara’s real…the baby she gave birth to?”

“I don’t even want to think about that.” I felt my eyes burn. Tara was more sister than friend to me, and I was haunted by what might have happened to her baby. Did she end up in a shallow grave? A Dumpster somewhere? What happened to the baby we should have been allowed to love and grieve? I put my hands to my face. “What do I do, Ian?” I asked.

“Well, first off, Tara needs to know,” he said.

“Oh, God,” I said, because of course she did. I knew that, but I’d needed to hear someone else say it. “It seems so cruel,” I said.

I thought I heard the faintest creaking sound from the direction of the stairs and I glanced toward the hallway, but Ian didn’t seem to notice.

“Let’s say Tara and I knew that Jenny wasn’t your biological child,” he said, “would you want us to tell you?”

“Yes, of course, but I would….” I shut my eyes, trying to imagine getting that news. “It would kill me to know my own child had died and I’d known nothing about it. And that Jenny had been stolen from some other woman.” I shook my head. “Oh, my God. It would just kill me.”

“No, it wouldn’t, because Tara would be there for you,” Ian said. “You two have seen each other through thick and thin, and you’ll be there for her, all right? And I will be, too.”

“She just lost Sam, though, Ian,” I nearly wailed. “How can we take away her daughter?” I was upset, but felt relief that suddenly I could use the word we instead of I.

“We’re not talking about taking away anyone’s daughter,” he said. “To be honest, I have to do a little research into this to figure out the best approach, but we’ll take it one step at a time. It shouldn’t be too difficult to track down the officers who investigated this case back in ’94. I may even know some of them.”

“I think we need to let Tara know before you talk to anyone else, though,” I said. “I’m afraid she’ll be angry that I told you before I told her. And I can tell her that maybe I’m wrong. When it comes right down to it, we don’t have proof, do we? I can just tell her what I know. Maybe somehow I’m misinterpreting things.”

“That’s very true,” he said. “There will have to be DNA tests and interviews, and as I said, we’ll take it one step at a time.”

“Should we tell her today?” My voice was so tentative. I was dreading what lay ahead of me.

Ian folded his arms across his chest. “Can you wait another couple of days?” he asked. “I’m leaving tonight for Charlotte and I’m in a golf tournament all day tomorrow.” For the first time since his arrival, he smiled, then rested his hand flat on the logbook. “Not that I think my golf game is more important than this,” he said, “but tomorrow’s a holiday and this has held for sixteen years. I won’t call the investigator until after we talk to Tara, so if you can handle waiting, we can talk to her Tuesday afternoon when she gets out of school.”

I heard another creak coming from the direction of the stairs, and this time both Ian and I looked toward the hallway.

“Jenny?” I called, but there was no answer.

I turned back to Ian. Licked my dry lips. “Yes,” I said, my voice very low now. “I can wait.”

41

Grace

It was like having a giant ball of thorns in my chest, the pain was that bad. I felt like I was having some kind of breakdown. I’d gotten my hopes up that Cleve and I would get back together. They were still up and I wanted to try calling him again in the worst way. It made me realize how often I’d been calling and texting him. Had I been annoying him? I could call to apologize for calling him too much. I couldn’t stop thinking of excuses to contact him. But I knew I couldn’t or I’d drive him even further away.

Instead, I lay on my bed with my feet up on my headboard and texted Jenny all afternoon while my mother was out. I told her how I’d come up with the plan to drive to Chapel Hill and what a bitch my mother was. I told her I’d made up that Elena girl in case my mother ever asked about her. I hardly ever lied. Everyone else I knew lied all the time, but I really didn’t and it had felt amazingly easy. My mother was so gullible. I had to admit the whole thing had been a really stupid idea, although I still wanted to do it. It was pouring rain out now, though, and I wouldn’t be able to get there until dark and wouldn’t know where I was going. I had his dorm address, but…it was just a stupid idea.

I’d look like the pathetic girl he thought I was.

Jenny texted me that she needed to get some juice, so for a few minutes it was just me and my phone. Dangerous. I typed Sorry i annoyed u so much to Cleve, but I erased it without sending.

Jenny was taking forever to get her juice. R u there yet? I texted her, but she didn’t text me back. Somehow I fell asleep and when I woke up, my phone was ringing and her cell number was on the display.

“I fell asleep,” I said, instead of hello.

“I’m coming over there.” She sounded terrible and I knew it had to hurt for her to talk.

“You are? It’s pouring out and you’re sick.”

“There’s something I have to tell you. To show you. Is your mom home yet?”

“No. What are you—”

“I’m coming right now, okay?”

I lowered my feet from the headboard and sat up. “Is it about Cleve?” I asked, but she’d already hung up.

When I opened the front door a few minutes later, Jenny stood there shivering and holding an umbrella over her head. I grabbed her arm and pulled her inside.

“What’s so important?” I asked.

“Your mom’s not home yet, right?” Her voice was low and hoarse and her nose was red. She was holding a plastic grocery bag with a book or something inside it.

“No. This is about Cleve, isn’t it?” What if he’d been in an accident? Oh, God! I’d die.

She gave me a little shove toward the stairs. “It’s not about Cleve,” she said. “Let’s go to your room.”

I let her push me across the hall. “You’re seriously freaking me out,” I said as we climbed the stairs.

“Just go,” she said.

In my room, Jenny grabbed the box of tissues from one of the nightstands. She sat on the edge of my bed with the tissues on one side of her and the plastic bag on the other. She pulled a tissue from the box and blew her nose while I just stood there, twisting my hands together, waiting for her to get to the point.

“Look,” Jenny said finally, “this timing sucks and I’m sorry about that, but I found out something you need to know. It has to do with you. Who you are.”

“What do you mean, who I am?” Did she mean my personality? Did I have some trait so horrible that she had to rush over in the rain while she was sick as a dog to tell me about it? Maybe so. After all, Cleve wasn’t crazy about who I was. Neither was my mother. Neither was I.

“Just listen to me,” she said, “and remember I’m your best friend forever, okay? I always will be. Always, always, Gracie, no matter what!” Her eyes looked glassy and I started to cry without even knowing why. Anything that had her this upset was going to make a mess out of me, too.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Ian was at my house like an hour ago.”

“Ian?” What did Ian have to do with anything? “Is this more about the will?” I wasn’t hurt that Noelle left more money to Jenny than to me. Jenny deserved it. I didn’t.

“No, not the will. I thought that, too, but that wasn’t it at all. I was upstairs while you and I were texting, and when I started to go downstairs for more juice, I heard them talking and… I don’t remember what my mom was saying but it made me stop and just listen in. They were talking about—” Jenny hesitated “—I am so sorry to tell you this!”

“Tell me what?”

“They said how you’re not really your mom’s daughter. How you were stolen from some other woman.”

“What?” What was she saying? “Are you sure they were talking about me?”

“Yes.”

“That’s… Why would they say that? It’s ridiculous.”

“I know. It sounds crazy, but they were talking about it and I was totally shocked.” She blew her nose again. “I just stood there listening, trying to get what they meant. Your mom doesn’t know but they’re going to tell her.”

“Know what? How can they know something about me that my own mother doesn’t know?” I tried to laugh. “This is like the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I know, but—”

“Do you hear how stupid this sounds? You just said my mother stole me, which is totally ridiculous, anyway, but if she stole me, then how could she not know I was stolen?” I wanted to throw something at Jenny. “Why are you screwing with my head?”

“I’m sorry! I know. But I can explain everything.” She opened the grocery bag and pulled out a big brown book and a manila file folder. Her hands were shaking all over the place. “I sat on the stairs until after Ian left and then I went into the kitchen like I wanted more juice,” she said. “I think Mom was worried I’d overheard them, but I acted like I just came downstairs right that minute and poured some juice. I watched her put this book and things in the drawer in the kitchen. You know by the desk she uses?”

“What’s the book?” I sat down next to her on the bed.

“It’s got notes from when Noelle delivered babies. I looked over her notes from when you were born and it doesn’t say anything weird that I could tell. But these things were with it.” She opened the folder and took out a type-written sheet of paper. “This letter…part of a letter. Noelle wrote it.” She handed it to me.

I could hardly believe what I was reading.

“This is disgusting!” I said, horrified. “I can’t believe Noelle would do something like that.”

“I know. Me neither, but—”

“Why would you think I’m the baby she took?”

“I don’t understand for sure how they know it’s you, but they do,” Jenny said. “I think it’s because of this. Because of the date here.” She pulled two sheets of printer paper from the folder and showed me the top one. “See the URL at the bottom? This is from the website of the Missing Children’s Bureau. It’s just one line.” She read it out loud in her raspy voice. “‘Lily Ann Knightly was born August 29, 1994, and disappeared from a Wilmington, NC, hospital shortly after her birth.’”

I shook my head slowly. I was starting to feel nauseated.

“Were there other…I mean, could it have been a different baby Noelle delivered? Why are they so sure it’s me? Your birthday is a day closer to hers than mine.” Lily. Could that really be my name?

“But Noelle had nothing to do with me being born.”

Jenny put her arm around me. The truth was sinking in for both of us. We knew I looked nothing like my parents. I had their brown eyes, but so did half the kids in the country. Everyone always said I was quiet and smart like my father, but plenty of kids were quiet and smart. And I was nothing like my mother. Nothing.

“I can’t believe this,” I said quietly.

“I’m sorry,” Jenny said. “I thought you had a right to know. I didn’t know if they’d ever tell you.”

I touched the sheet of printer paper. Lily Ann Knightly. Lily. “Who am I?” I asked.

Jenny pressed her cheek to my shoulder and her arm tightened around me. “You’re Grace,” she said. “My best friend, and don’t you ever forget it.”

My mind was miles away. “I always knew I didn’t fit in. My mother… It’s like she wishes I was someone else,” I said. “That dead baby. That’s who my mother was supposed to get as her daughter.” I stood and waved my hands through the air. “Oh, my God, Jenny. A baby died. I hate Noelle. How could anyone do something like this?”

“If she never took you, you wouldn’t be my friend, though, and I can’t stand that thought.”

It was true. I couldn’t imagine my life without Jenny in it. But that felt like the only thing that was good about my life right then.

“When are they going to tell my mother?” That would be it, I thought. That would be the moment my mother cut me out of her heart. Right now, she had to love me and put up with me. No wonder she’s nothing like me, my mother would think. How could she help but think that? How could she help but wonder about how different, how perfect, her real daughter would have been?

“I think Tuesday,” Jenny said. “Don’t tell her I told you, okay? My mother would kill me for snooping. I have to get these things back before she figures out I took them.”

“What’s the other paper?” I pointed to the two sheets of printer paper on her lap.

“It’s just nothing.” Jenny stuck both sheets back in the folder.

“Let me see,” I said. Jenny was a terrible liar.

She hesitated, then reached into the folder and handed me another paper printed from the Missing Children’s Bureau website.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.

I couldn’t speak. My mother? And a sister. “Where do they live?” I was finally able to ask. “Are they in Wilmington?”

“I don’t think so. She’s director of this Missing Children’s place and I don’t think that’s here.”

“She’s been looking for me,” I whispered. “All my life, she’s been looking for me.” I felt so much sympathy for her. Sympathy, and a longing so strong I felt it from the center of my heart to the ends of my fingers. “She probably thinks I’m dead.”

Jenny took the paper from my hand and put it back in the folder. “Look, I’ve got to get home,” she said. “I told my mother I was just going to the store for cough medicine. She’ll be calling me any second.”

“Leave the papers with me,” I said.

“I can’t. She’ll notice they’re gone.”

“Please, Jenny. I need them.”

“I can’t.” She started to put the folder back in the grocery bag, but I grabbed it from her and hugged it to my chest.

“Grace! I have to put them back!” she said.

“I’m keeping them. They’re mine. They’re about me.”

“Gracie. Please. She’ll kill me.” She grabbed for the folder but I turned around quickly, opened my dresser drawer and shut the file inside it.

“Grace!” She tried to get to the drawer but I held her away. “You can find the same stuff on that website,” she said. “On that Missing Children’s website.”

I held my hands out to my sides to keep her from getting to the drawer. She was right; I could find the information on the site, but I wanted those sheets of paper. Suddenly I felt like I couldn’t stand one more thing being taken away from me. “Let me keep them, Jenny,” I pleaded. I felt tears running down my cheeks. “Let them be mine.”

She stared at me a minute, then pulled me into a hug. “Make copies,” she said into my hair. “Then give them back to me tomorrow.” I wasn’t sure which one of us was crying harder.

I sat in my room for an hour after Jenny left, the two sheets of paper on my lap. I’d stared at the words on them for a long time before it got too dark to see them any longer, and it was like I didn’t have the energy to turn on the light. When my mother came home, she stopped in my room to tell me she’d picked up sandwiches for dinner. I turned on the light then because I wanted to see if she looked any different to me, but she didn’t. She wasn’t the one who had changed in the past couple of hours.

After my mother went downstairs again, I logged on to the internet. I found the website for the Missing Children’s Bureau and followed the URL to the page about Anna Knightly. I caught my breath. A picture! Omigod, she looked so amazing. She had this open, beautiful face. You could tell so much from a picture. She looked gentle and full of love. She had green eyes, which had to be where my flecks of green came from. I didn’t think she looked anything like me otherwise, though. My own mother—at least, the mother who raised me—looked more like me than Anna Knightly did. I tried to find myself in her face, holding my hand mirror in front of me so I could look back and forth from my reflection to her photograph. My real father, I thought. I must look more like him. I shivered, creeped out by the thought of having any other father than the one I’d grown up with. The one I would love forever, no matter what.

I read the one sentence over and over again. “Her infant daughter, Lily, disappeared.” How did they tell her that her baby had vanished? I pictured this pretty, soft-looking woman going into the hospital nursery to take her daughter home, and all the nurses scrambling to look for the baby, their panic rising as they realized she was gone. I was gone. I still couldn’t get it through my head that Lily was me. I could imagine how Anna Knightly felt when they told her. How she’d grieved for her. For me. I could have had a whole different life.

Missing children turned up dead. That’s the way it always was on the news, and after all this time that had to be what Anna Knightly expected. She only knew I disappeared. She didn’t know the rest of my story.

“I’m alive,” I said to the picture on my monitor. “I’m right here.”

Where did she live? Could I find a phone number for her somehow? Could I call her right now? Right this second? I wanted to tell her I was alive. She could die tomorrow and we never would have known each other.

There was a phone number for the Missing Children’s Bureau and I wrote it down. There was an address, too, in Alexandria, Virginia, one state away. My mother—my biological mother—was only one puny state away.

I couldn’t sleep. I kept picturing a map. Alexandria was in the northern part of Virginia, wasn’t it? Near Washington? Washington was only like five hours away. I needed to meet Anna. I needed to find out who I really was. I could call her at the Missing Children’s Bureau early in the morning, but it would be so much better to meet her in person. I sat up, totally wired. I had to meet her now, I thought, as soon as I possibly could. Life was short. Tomorrow Anna could get killed driving to work. It happened.

I grabbed my phone and speed-dialed Cleve’s number and when he picked up—he picked up!—I burst into tears.

“Don’t hang up. Don’t hang up!” I said. “I have to talk to you. It’s not about us. Don’t worry. I just have to talk to you or I’ll go crazy.”

“Grace, it’s nearly midnight.” He sounded wide-awake. I heard people talking in the background. A girl laughing. “We can talk tomorrow, okay?” he asked.

“I just found out I was stolen from another woman when I was a baby!”

He was quiet. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I explained everything: Jenny overhearing the conversation between her mother and Ian. Noelle’s letter to Anna Knightly. The stolen baby. The Missing Children’s Bureau.

“I don’t believe this,” he said. “Are you making this up?”

“No,” I said. “Talk to Jenny tomorrow if you don’t believe me. They’re going to tell my mother Tuesday. She already thinks I’m…” My voice broke, catching me off guard. “I’ve never really been the daughter she wanted. The other baby, the one who died, probably would have been just like her.”

“Hold on a sec,” Cleve said. I heard him moving around. A door opening, maybe. “I had to go out in the hall,” he said after a minute. “My roommate’s got company. Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but your mom loves you. Everyone has issues with their mother, Grace. I’d love to disown mine half the time. But she’s my mother and she loves me and yours does, too.”

“That’s the difference. Suzanne is your mother. My mother isn’t. I want to meet my real mother and tell her everything. I’m going there.”

“Where?”

“Virginia. I’m going to go meet her.”

“When? And how do you plan to get there?”

“I’ll drive. Tomorrow.”

He laughed. “Don’t be so twelve years old, Grace.”

His words stung. “You don’t know how this feels,” I said.

“Look, tomorrow you tell your mother what Jenny told you, and—”

“I’ll get Jenny in trouble. She’s not supposed to know any of this.”

“Jenny’ll get over it. You tell your mom. If what you’re saying is true—and I doubt it—you and your mom need a lawyer. Ian’s a lawyer, right? There’s all kinds of legal stuff that’ll need to be sorted out.”

“Lawyers screw everything up,” I said. My father had been a great lawyer, but he always slowed things down when it came to his clients’ cases. I bet Ian was the same way. Daddy wanted everybody to take their time. Not rush into things. If he was alive, I wondered what he would do with this mess. “Oh, Cleve,” I said, “my dad’s not really my dad!”

“He’s your dad and your mom’s your mom. Even if this other lady had you, your parents are still your parents.”

“I’m really freaked out, Cleve,” I said, but my mind was moving away from our conversation. I walked over to my computer, sat down and clicked on Google Maps.

Cleve sighed again. “Look,” he said, “promise me you’ll tell your mother tomorrow and that you won’t do anything stupid. I care about you, Grace,” he said. “That’ll never change. So, promise?”

“I promise,” I said, but I was already typing in the address for the Missing Children’s Bureau.

42

Anna

Washington, D.C.

“What do you think of this look, Dad?” Haley asked Bryan as he opened the curtain around her hospital bed. We’d gotten her settled into the room a few hours earlier and it was very late, but she only now seemed to be winding down from a steroid-induced high. She’d lifted the top of her tray table to check her reflection in the mirror and she ran her hand over the dark stubble of hair that had sprouted up this past week.

“Very cool.” Bryan stood next to her bed, running his hand over the short, soft bristles. I knew how her hair felt beneath his palm. The tickle of it beneath my own hand could give me a false sense of security. I had to keep reminding myself that the little bit of stubble was simply the lull before the storm.

Tomorrow she’d receive another dose of her maintenance chemotherapy and that regimen would continue until a donor was found. Once we had a donor, the chemo and radiation she’d receive would destroy far more than her hair as it readied her body to receive the transplant. I refused to think a donor might never be found before the disease claimed her. Would not even go there. And tonight, I wanted her simply to enjoy her stubbly reflection in the mirror and our last few hours with Bryan. I’d be staying overnight with Haley, but he’d head back to his apartment shortly. Tomorrow he’d be on a plane for San Francisco, where he’d have the interview for the D.C. job. I wasn’t happy to see him go. I’d taken care of Haley by myself for most of her life, so it wasn’t that I needed his help, although his help had been wonderful. It was that I’d grown attached to him and so had Haley. We wanted him around.

“There’s our girl!” Tom, Haley’s favorite nurse, came into the room. “I have your nighty-night pill.”

Haley took the little paper cup from his hand.

“I knew you were coming in tonight,” Tom said while she swallowed the pill, “so I cut this out in case you wanted an extra.” He handed Haley a copy of the article about the bone marrow drive that had appeared in the Washington Post on Friday. Haley’d been great with the journalist from the Post and even better with the reporter from WJLA. She’d talked about what she remembered from her first bout with leukemia. “I just thought all little kids had to be hooked up to killer drugs all the time,” she said simply. “I didn’t know any different.” She talked about Lily in a way I never would have been able to. “My mom lost my sister,” she said. “I don’t want her to lose me, too.” I cringed inside when she said that, hoping no one would think she was being disingenuous. I knew she meant every word and I was touched. So apparently were many others. The car dealership showroom filled with people the following day, all of them volunteering to have their cheeks swabbed.

Once Tom had left the room, Haley lowered the head of her bed until she was lying nearly flat. “Okay,” she said to Bryan, “you’re coming back Wednesday?”

“Wednesday at four o’clock.” He clicked off the bright light on her night table. I was at the foot of her bed, and I watched the movement of flesh and muscle beneath the back of his polo shirt. This week, I’d discovered it wasn’t only certain celebrities who could leave me weak in the knees. If anyone had told me the man I’d held in contempt for so many years could have the same effect on me, I would have said they were crazy.

“What do you want me to bring back from San Francisco?” he asked Haley.

“Just you,” she said, and I saw the wave of emotion pass over Bryan’s features. Haley was so open with her feelings these days. She never wore the mask that so many of us hid behind. She left herself vulnerable, as though she realized there was no time to waste with pretense. We had no promise of tomorrow. None of us did. I was learning so much from my daughter.

“You’re sweet,” Bryan said to her. “But seriously. How about some Ghirardelli chocolate?”

She made a face. “That sounds good right now, but I probably won’t feel like eating it by Wednesday.”

“We can save it for when you do want it, then.” He looked at his watch. “I’d better run.”

“I’ll walk you down,” I said, then turned to Haley, who had curled up beneath the covers with Fred cuddled in her arms. “Are you okay for a little bit?”

She yawned, nodding. Bryan bent down to kiss her on the cheek and she wrapped one arm around his neck. “Don’t forget about us,” she said softly.

He stood, holding her hand between both of his. “No,” he said. “Never.”

We walked quietly to the elevator and rode down to the parking garage, which was nearly empty this late. I walked him all the way to his car. I didn’t want to see him go. Maybe I felt some of Haley’s trepidation. Some of that Don’t forget about us. But I didn’t think that was it. I wanted to be with him every moment that I could. I was going to let go of my own mask.

He unlocked his car door, then turned to me.

“Hurry back,” I said.

He smiled, then pulled me into a long hug that brought memories flooding back to me. They were the good memories, the ones from when we were young and the future held nothing but promise.

“Hold on,” he said, letting go of me. He opened the rear door, then climbed in and tugged me in after him. I laughed, practically falling next to him on the bench seat. He kissed me and we made out like the kids we once were, laughing at first at how ludicrous it seemed to be two forty-something people, fooling around in the backseat in a parking garage, but after a while, our laughter stopped and the car filled with our breathing, our touching and the sweet new beginning of a complicated love.

43

Grace

Wilmington, North Carolina

I was still awake at three in the morning, lying in bed, planning my next move. The more I thought about going to Alexandria, the more I knew I had to do it. I’d already printed the directions to the Missing Children’s Bureau and it looked pretty easy. Almost a straight shot from Wilmington to Alexandria, though I couldn’t picture myself actually driving that straight shot, and it was a longer drive than I’d thought. According to Google Maps, it would take five hours and fifty minutes to get there. Five hours and fifty minutes to find my biological mother. When I thought about it that way, it sounded like no time at all.

I’d have to leave as soon as the sun came up. My mother didn’t have school tomorrow because of the holiday, but she never slept in. Getting up before she did would be hard. I’d set my phone alarm for six, but now I changed it to five. I should leave while it was still dark. If I left at five-thirty in the morning, I’d be there by lunchtime. My heart thumped at the thought of walking into the Missing Children’s Bureau and announcing my identity to the woman who was my mother.

What if she went out to lunch, though? One of those long business-type lunches like my father used to take? I picked up my phone from the night table again and pressed the display to see the time. Three-ten and I was wide-awake. I’d never been so awake. I felt like I’d drunk a bucket of coffee. If I left right now, I could be at the Missing Children’s Bureau way before lunch. But it was so dark outside and I could still hear the rain thrumming against my window. I’d only driven a few times in the rain before I’d lost my nerve behind the wheel altogether.

“Do it,” I said out loud.

I got up quickly and put on the same cropped pants and blue sweater I’d worn that day. I dumped my textbooks and notebooks out of my backpack onto my bed and replaced them with clean underwear, my toothbrush and toothpaste, and the folder Jenny’d left with me. I was moving fast, as if I was in a race. In a way, I was. I was trying to beat the part of me that thought my plan was not only stupid but dangerous. I hadn’t driven since before my father died, and I’d never driven alone and never more than a couple of hours at a time. I grabbed the directions I’d printed out, lifted my backpack to my shoulder and quietly walked downstairs. I took the keys to the Honda from the key cupboard by the back door and left the house before I could change my mind.

I did okay driving for about an hour. I knew I was going way too slow, but it was hard to see. The rain made the road as shiny as a mirror and I kept picturing deer zipping out of the darkness in front of my car. I nearly had the road to myself, though, and that was both good and spooky. Then all of a sudden, the rain got unbelievably heavy. Heavy wasn’t even the right word to describe it. It fell in blinding waves against my car, pounding so hard on the roof that I couldn’t hear the radio. The wipers were set to their fastest setting, but it was still impossible to see more than a few feet in front of me. I slowed down to forty miles an hour, then thirty, sticking really close to the shoulder. There were more cars on the road by then and none of those drivers seemed to be having any problem with the rain as they zipped past me. One of them honked at me, probably because I was driving so slowly. My hands were sweaty, but I kept them glued to the steering wheel and I was leaning forward like I could somehow see better if my face was closer to the windshield.

I’d just decided I’d better pull over and wait for the rain to ease up when it suddenly did. I sat back a little and let out my breath. I could hear the music on the radio again. I pressed harder on the gas and got my speed up to fifty-five, which was as fast as I was willing to go until the sun was up. So much for that five hours and fifty minutes.

It was light out by the time I crossed the border into Virginia, but it was still raining a little. I was going back and forth in my mind about whether I should call Jenny to tell her where I was when I had a horrible thought. I remembered changing the alarm on my phone to five o’clock. I could see the phone on my night table, but I had no memory of picking it up and putting it in my backpack. Oh, my God. I pressed the brake and swerved onto the shoulder of the road. A truck honked and I felt my car sway as it whizzed past me, way too close. I found the button for the emergency blinkers and put them on and then I started hunting for my phone in my backpack, the whole time knowing it wasn’t there. How could I have been so stupid? I was hours from home, on the highway, with no phone. I sat there paralyzed for a few minutes, glancing every once in a while at the floor of the car or the passenger seat as though a phone might magically appear. What could I do? I was two-thirds of the way there. I just had to keep going. Swallowing hard, I turned off my blinkers and waited for a long break between the cars. Then I pulled onto the road again.

A couple of hours later, I didn’t know where I was, but I was good and stuck in traffic. People complained about rush-hour traffic in Wilmington, but they didn’t know what they were talking about. I’d sit still for five minutes, then move about ten feet, then sit still again. There were gigantic trucks on both sides of me and I felt trapped and claustrophobic. They were so big that I could see beneath them to the cars in the other lanes. At least when I’d been driving through the rain and the darkness, I’d had no time to think about anything other than staying alive. Now I was tired and worn-out and the plan that had seemed so right at three in the morning was starting to feel idiotic.

I should have left a note for my mother, though I wasn’t sure what I could have said. When she figured out I was gone, she’d probably think I went to Chapel Hill. It didn’t matter. I was going to be in tons of trouble either way.

Suddenly I remembered something Daddy told me once when I was angry at my mother. “You know how Mom arranges orange slices on a plate for your soccer team and has activities planned for your birthday parties two months in advance?” he’d asked me. “That’s the way she shows her love, Gracie.” Why was I thinking about that now? I could hear his voice so clearly, like he was talking to me from the backseat of the car. That’s the way she shows her love, Gracie.

She loved me. I never really doubted that. It would hurt her to realize I wasn’t hers and to find out that her own baby died. I pictured Emerson sitting her down to tell her the truth and I could see my mother’s face crumple.

The traffic was starting to move now. I let the trucks pull away from me and I could see old buildings and smokestacks and cranes, and everything was a blur through my tears.

I clutched the steering wheel. “What are you doing?” I whispered to myself. “What are you doing?”

44

Tara

Grace was sleeping in, and I thought that was a good thing. She’d been so upset about Cleve the day before and I knew I hadn’t handled the situation well. I’d had to put my foot down about the trip to Chapel Hill, of course, but could I have done it a different way? Some way that didn’t shut down communication? What communication? We had none. Next week, I’d call the therapist we’d seen a couple of times after Sam died. Grace wouldn’t talk to her, either, but maybe the woman could give me some ideas for a fresh start with my daughter. Grace and I needed a do-over.

I sat at the kitchen table and made out a grocery list, trying to focus on something less nerve-racking than the deteriorating relationship between Grace and myself. I left a note for her on the table, telling her I was going to the store, then walked through the mudroom to the garage.

In the garage, I stopped short. Sam’s old Honda was gone. It gave me such a jolt. I had a flash of irrational hope that Sam was alive and on his way to work. That the past seven months had been a terrible dream. But I was too much of a realist to dwell in that fantasy for long. Either the car had been stolen or Grace had taken it. I didn’t know which possibility seemed more unlikely.

I went back in the house and knocked on Grace’s door, opening it when there was no answer. Her room was a mess as usual, her bed so heaped with junk that I had to move the books and clothing to prove to myself she was really gone. I felt no anger, only sheer unadulterated terror. My baby girl was driving, no doubt to Chapel Hill. It was raining and she was upset and not thinking clearly and she hadn’t driven in seven months. She’d be driving on the highway with complicated on-and off-ramps and speeding cars and drivers hungover from the night before. Sam had been killed at the familiar Monkey Junction intersection. What chance did Grace have to make it to Chapel Hill alive?

I reached for the phone on Grace’s desk, but stopped myself from dialing. I didn’t want her to try to answer her cell phone while she was driving. Then I remembered Jenny’s older friend was with her and that she was probably doing the driving. I let out my breath in relief. At least I could stop picturing Grace behind the wheel. I only wished I knew Jenny’s friend and that she was trustworthy.

I dialed Grace’s cell phone and jumped when I heard its distinctive ring coming from inches away on her night table. “Oh, no,” I said, grabbing her phone. The display was lit up, our home number prominently displayed. She’d left without her phone? I hung up and sank onto her bed, trying to figure out what was going on. Grace never went anywhere without her phone.

I scrolled through the numbers on her phone and dialed Jenny’s cell. It took a few rings before she picked up and I knew I’d awakened her.

“I thought about you all night,” she said, her voice thick and hoarse. “You okay?”

She was obviously in on this grand adventure. “It’s Tara, Jenny,” I said.

There was a beat of silence. “Oh,” she said. “Sorry. Why are you calling on Grace’s phone?”

“I need the cell phone number for your friend who’s with Grace,” I said tersely. “I can’t remember her name.”

Jenny was quiet again. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Isn’t Grace there?”

“No. She left the house before I got up this morning, and I assume…” Could I be wrong? “She took the Honda and forgot her phone. I assume she’s on her way to see Cleve. She told me yesterday she wanted to go and would have a friend of yours—an older girl—along as a supervising driver.”

Jenny said nothing and I knew she was either hiding something or as much in the dark as I was.

“Jenny?” I asked. “Do you know where she is?”

“I’m totally confused,” she said.

“Who’s your older friend? Helen or…Elena!” I suddenly remembered. “Her name was Elena.”

“I…I’m not sure what’s going on.”

I got to my feet. “Jenny!” I said, sharply now because panic was rising inside me. “What do you know? This is serious! Did she tell you she was going to Chapel Hill?”

“No!” Jenny said. “I honestly don’t know where she is. Did you try calling her?”

“I told you, she forgot her phone. I’m going to call Cleve. If you hear anything from her or from Elena… Do you have a friend named Elena?”

She didn’t answer.

“Jenny!”

“No,” she admitted.

Damn it. “Call me if you hear anything,” I said, then hung up. I found Cleve’s number on Grace’s phone and dialed it, but my call was dumped into his voice mail. “Cleve, this is Tara,” I said. “Call me the second you get this. I’m serious!” I gave him my number so he wouldn’t have to dig it up.

I hung up the phone and looked at my watch. It was a little after ten. She must have taken off before I got up at seven. It was possible, though not likely, that she was in Chapel Hill by now.

Through her bedroom window, I could see the rain battering the leaves of the maple tree in our side yard and I shook my head. I couldn’t picture her driving around the block. Imagining her driving in this rain was both impossible and horrifying.

Please, God, let her be safe!

Then I picked up her phone and tried Cleve’s number again.

45

Grace

Alexandria, Virginia

I was on a highway called the Beltway and I’d never seen so many cars going so fast at one time. It was like being stuck in a parking lot that was moving at sixty-five miles an hour, and my leg muscles shook as I pressed on the gas trying to keep up. I was so glad to see the exit for Alexandria. My GPS gave me a few turns to make and I was suddenly in the middle of a busy road in a little town. I needed gas and, even worse, coffee. I spotted a gas station and pulled in. I bought twenty dollars worth of gas and a comb. The only one they had was made for men and it had teeth so close together I’d probably never be able to get it through my hair. I bought a cup of coffee that tasted really old and lukewarm, but I didn’t care and I chugged it down right there in the disgusting gas station store.

When I pulled back onto the road, my GPS said I was only a mile from my destination. Then half a mile. Then four hundred feet, and I began to think it was leading me the wrong way. Wouldn’t the Missing Children’s Bureau be in a big office building? All during the drive, that’s where I pictured meeting my mother. On the fourth or fifth floor of a big office building. But the buildings on this road were small and they looked more like little shops and town houses than offices.

I was stuck at a red light when I noticed a banner about a block in front of me. It hung high in the air above the street. Columbus Day Parade! Oh, no. Oh, no. I’d forgotten about it being a holiday. Would the Missing Children’s Bureau be closed?

My GPS said, “Arriving at destination.” I was certain it had screwed up, but the traffic wasn’t moving and I had a chance to look at the building numbers and there it was—237. It was a little yellow town house in the middle of a string of other little town houses. It had to be wrong, yet I could see some kind of rectangular plaque hanging next to the door, although I couldn’t read it from where I sat. I’d have to get closer.

I couldn’t parallel park. I’d screwed it up every time I tried during my driver’s training and there was no way I could do it with all these cars around me. I turned down a side street and drove a couple of blocks before I found two spaces together and was able to slip the car next to the curb. When I finally turned off the engine, I just sat there for a minute as what I’d done really hit me. I just drove all the way from Wilmington to Alexandria, I thought, and even though I was doing the craziest thing I’d ever done in my life, I felt proud of myself. Whatever happened next, I’d done something pretty amazing.

Now, though, came the really hard part.

I looked at my face in the rearview mirror. I looked terrible. I did my best to comb my hair, but it was impossible with that stupid comb.

Please be open, I thought as I got out of the car and started walking on the wet sidewalk toward the main street. I walked fast, my backpack over my shoulder, the folder inside it ready to tell the story.

The rectangular sign next to the door read Missing Children’s Bureau, and I could see a light on inside. The door was unlocked and I pushed it open and walked into a small room filled with old-fashioned chairs and a love seat and a bay window overflowing with plants. There was a desk right in the middle of the room, but there was no sign of another human being and I wasn’t sure what to do.

I heard a clinking noise coming from somewhere in the next room and a woman suddenly appeared in the doorway. She had really short gray hair, narrow little black-framed glasses and she was holding a stick of celery in her hand. Her eyebrows shot halfway up her forehead when she saw me.

“You startled me!” she said, then smiled. “May I help you?”

“I’m here to see Anna Knightly,” I said.

“Oh, Ms. Knightly’s with her daughter at Children’s,” she said, sitting down behind the desk.

I felt suddenly dizzy at hearing someone else talk about Anna Knightly like she really, truly existed. It had all started to feel like a fantasy to me. I had to balance myself with my hand on the edge of the desk.

“Are you all right, honey?” the woman asked me, and then her words sunk in. Her daughter. My sister. And wasn’t I at the Missing Children’s Bureau?

“Children’s?” I asked. “Do you mean…isn’t this the Missing Children’s Bureau?”

“Yes.” She looked confused. “Oh. No, no. She’s at Children’s Hospital. Did you—” she looked at me strangely, then checked her computer screen “—you didn’t have an appointment with her, did you? I thought I reached everyone.”

“No, but I need to see her.” A hospital? My sister was sick? “I know something about a missing child,” I said. “I need to talk to her about it.” I didn’t want to tell the woman who I was. What if she thought I was lying? What if she called the police?

“Oh, well, you can give me the information. Ms. Knightly doesn’t generally deal directly with—”

“No, that’s okay. I really need to talk to her. When will she be back?”

“She’s taking some time off to be with her daughter. Would you like some coffee? A soda?”

The woman was worried about me now. I imagined how I looked after a sleepless night, my hair half-combed, my teeth unbrushed. I’d totally forgotten about the toothbrush in my backpack.

“No, thank you. I came a long way to see her, though.” I felt my voice break. “How can I talk to her? Please. I really need to.”

She looked at me like she was trying to decide what to do. “Give me your cell phone number and I can—”

“I don’t have one.” My voice cracked again and I knotted my hands together in front of me. “I forgot it when I left the house. Just tell me where the hospital is.” I could tell right away that was a mistake.

The woman shook her head. “Now, look,” she said. “Ms. Knightly is dealing with a serious private matter and you can’t disturb her, all right?”

I’m a serious private matter, I thought. “Oh, I know,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”

The woman handed me a small notepad. “Write down your name and a way she can reach you.”

“There is no way. I forgot my phone.”

She sighed. “Tell me what this is regarding, honey, so I can help you.”

“It’s private,” I said.

She gave me one of those smiles that said she was getting annoyed. “Well, look.” She leaned back in her chair. “I’ll be here until five. I’m sure I’ll speak with her sometime today. I’ll ask her how you can get in touch with her, then you can stop back late this afternoon and I’ll tell you what she says. But if you could give me some more information, it would be very helpful.”

I thought about those prepaid phones you could buy. I’d never used one, but maybe I could get one of them and give the number to this woman and she could give it to Anna Knightly.

“Can I get your number?” I asked.

“Of course.” She handed me a card from a little tray on her desk and I put it in my pocket.

“Thanks,” I said, and turned to go.

“You’ll come back later?” she asked, but I was already out the door, trying to figure out my next move.

I passed a bank on my way back to my car and used the ATM to get some money. I had forty dollars with me, but I’d need more for gas and maybe a prepaid phone if I could find one. My mind was moving in a different direction, though. When I got to my car, I turned on the GPS and did a search for hospitals. There were a bunch of them, but the only one that had to do with children was called Children’s National Medical Center. Was that it? I liked the words medical center a lot better than I liked the word hospital.

It was in Washington. I plugged the address into the GPS. It was thirty-two minutes away. Yesterday, thirty-two minutes of driving would have sounded impossible to me. Now it sounded almost as easy as taking my next breath. But…the woman had used the word hospital. I couldn’t deny that, and I saw my father’s torn-apart face. I quickly waved my hand in front of my eyes as if I could erase the vision that way. I’d go. I’d go into the lobby and ask someone to take a note to Anna Knightly. I’d just driven three hundred and eighty-two miles by myself on no sleep. I could handle a hospital lobby. I had to.

46

Emerson

Wilmington, North Carolina

The café was swamped. Even though it was a holiday, half the people in Wilmington seemed to have stopped by Hot! this morning. We’d run out of the raspberry-cream-cheese croissants I was becoming known for and Sandra and my waitress were having trouble keeping up. So I ignored my cell when it rang, not even taking the time to glance at the caller ID. Jenny was off from school, most likely lolling around the house, and I’d check my messages as soon as I had a break. But then the café phone rang and that I couldn’t ignore. Offices often placed their lunch orders in the morning to be picked up later, but I didn’t expect many of those calls on Columbus Day.

I grabbed the phone near the cash register. “Hot!” I said.

“Mom!” Jenny shouted in my ear, her voice raspy and frightened. “I have to tell you something.”

“What?” I carried the phone into the kitchen, alarmed.

“Please don’t kill me!” She sounded as though she’d set the house on fire. “I think Grace is on her way to find that Anna Knightly lady.”

I frowned, disbelieving. How could Grace—how could Jenny—possibly know about Anna Knightly? “What do you mean?”

“Tara called to say that Grace is gone. She took the car and Tara thinks she went to Chapel Hill, but I’m afraid—”

“Grace doesn’t even drive.” I felt so confused. I wanted to poke holes in whatever story Jenny was trying to tell me.

Sandra whisked by me with a tray of sandwiches and I stepped closer to the back door and out of the way.

“I called Cleve and he said he talked to Grace last night and she said she wanted to go to Virginia to find her mother.”

“Wait!” I had to stop her. “How could she—or you, for that matter—possibly know about her…about Anna Knightly?”

Jenny didn’t answer right away. “I heard you.” She sounded tearful. “I wasn’t trying to snoop, but I was coming downstairs when you and Ian were talking yesterday. And then I found that letter Noelle wrote. I went over to Grace’s and told her everything.”

I remembered the creaking sound from the stairs. Oh, God. I tried to imagine how devastated Grace had to have been. I pictured her reading Noelle’s letter to Anna Knightly. “You should have come to me with this, not Grace!”

“I’m sorry,” Jenny said. “But Grace had a right to know.”

“She may have a right to know, but, Jenny! We hadn’t even told Tara yet.”

“I didn’t think she’d, like, take off or anything,” she said. “Cleve said he thought he’d talked her out of going, but she was gone this morning and she’s not in Chapel Hill, at least not when I talked to him. So I think she’s on her way to find that woman!” Her voice rose to a fever pitch again.

“I need to get off the phone,” I said. “I’m going to Tara’s to tell her what’s going on.”

“Grace is such a terrible driver,” Jenny said. “If I thought she’d do something like this I never would have—”

“I know. I’ve got to get off.”

I hung up the phone and grabbed Sandra to tell her I was sorry, but she was going to have to take over for the next couple of hours. She gave me a frantic look, but she could tell from my face that there was no point arguing with me. In my car, I tried to call Ian before starting the ignition but his voice mail picked up and I imagined he was deep in his golf game by now. I was going to be on my own with this.

Yet when I pulled up in front of Tara’s house, I saw Jenny’s car parked on the street, Jenny waiting for me on the sidewalk in the misty rain. She was hugging herself, shivering, her arms tight across her chest, and I knew I was not going to be on my own with this, after all.

47

Tara

I heard the car door slam and ran to the front window, hoping against hope I’d see Grace walking up the sidewalk. But it was Emerson and Jenny, and as I watched them nearly run up to my front door, all I could think about was that they had horrible news to give me. The scenario was completely different, yet I had that same sickening feeling as I had the day the cop showed up at my classroom door to tell me Sam was dead. I knew the second I saw that young guy in uniform that something terrible had happened. I had the same feeling now.

I pulled open the front door. “What?” I called as they neared the porch. I felt the blood leave my face and the two of them swirled in my vision.

“We think we know where Grace is,” Emerson said as she stepped onto the porch.

“With Cleve?” I asked.

Emerson turned me to face the house. “We think she’s okay, Tara. Let’s sit down someplace, all right? We have a lot to explain to you.”

“What are you talking about?” I allowed her to lead me toward the family room. “Jenny, have you spoken to her? What do you mean, you think she’s okay? Where is she?”

“We’re sure she’s okay,” Emerson said more emphatically. She had her hand on my back and was guiding me toward the sofa. I sank into it. She and Jenny sat shoulder to shoulder on the love seat.

“Is she with Cleve?” I looked at Jenny, who shook her head, then lowered her eyes to her lap as though she couldn’t bear to look at me, which did nothing to ease my mind.

“Listen to me, Tara,” Emerson said. “The other day, I figured out the identity of the baby Noelle stole from the hospital. I think it was Grace.”

I stared at her, not comprehending. “That’s impossible. Grace was never in the hospital, you know that.” I glanced at Jenny. She was still avoiding my eyes, but apparently she knew about Noelle and the baby.

Emerson leaned forward. “Honey, listen,” she said. “I found more information on when Anna Knightly’s baby disappeared. It was around the time Grace was born. Right around the end of August 1994.”

“No,” I said, confused. “You mean 1998, when she stopped being a midwife.”

“It was 1994, and Grace was the only baby Noelle delivered around that time.”

“But Grace was born September first.” I knew I was stubbornly missing the gist of this conversation.

“I know it’s confusing,” Emerson said. “I know it’s unbelievable. But I think Noelle delivered your baby, not Grace, and it was your baby she accidentally dropped. And then she went to the hospital and took Anna Knightly’s baby and brought it back to your house and passed it…her…off as your baby. And that was Grace.”

“That’s insane,” I said.

“There were no other babies Noelle delivered during that time,” Emerson said. “No torn-out pages from the book or anything. I really think it was Grace, Tara. I’m so sorry.”

I ran my hand through my hair, thinking, thinking. I remembered the night Grace was born. The realization that something was wrong. The moments when Noelle was debating whether to call an ambulance before she managed to turn Grace inside me. I remembered that long dark night and the deathlike sleep that had gripped me afterward.

“I held her, though,” I said, frowning. “I nursed her right away.” She’d felt so warm, almost hot, against my skin. I’d loved that warmth. I could still remember it. Then the dreamless sleep. But Sam…had he been asleep, too? Could we have slept long enough for my child to slip through Noelle’s hands? Had we slept long enough for her to rush to the hospital and steal her replacement? As unbelievable as I’d found the whole idea before, now it seemed a hundred times more so.

“You’re saying…the baby I gave birth to died?”

Emerson stood from the love seat and sat down next to me, her arm around me. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I—”

“How does Jenny know all of this?” I asked. Jenny still wouldn’t look at me. She reminded me of Grace today, she was so quiet.

Emerson hesitated. “I talked to Ian about this yesterday, when I…connected the dots, and Jenny overheard.”

“You told Ian? Before you told me?” I pulled away from her, suddenly angry. “I’m the last to know about my own child? How long have you known?”

“I figured it out the night before Suzanne’s party,” Emerson confessed.

“And you didn’t tell me?” I felt like slapping her, I was so furious. I stood. “How could you tell Ian and not me?” I asked. “How dare you do that?”

“I didn’t know how…” Emerson shook her head. “I was afraid of hurting you.”

I couldn’t absorb it all. Just couldn’t. “Where is Grace?” I asked. There was no room in my mind at that moment for the baby I’d lost. A child who didn’t quite exist for me yet. There was only room for the child I loved with all my heart. “Where is she? Why is she—”

“She called Cleve last night after I told her,” Jenny said hoarsely. “She was really upset and she told him she wanted to go to Virginia to try to find her…that woman. He tried to talk her out of it.”

“You should never have talked to Grace about this!” I said.

“I know.” Her eyes were bloodshot and she sank deeper into the love seat.

“Please, Tara,” Emerson pleaded. “Jenny knows she screwed up.”

“How would she know where to find Anna Knightly?” I paced between the sofa and the window.

“The Missing Children’s place, I think,” Jenny said. “In Alexandria.”

Alexandria! I pictured Grace trying to make that long drive by herself in the rain, wondering who she was. Only a tremendous need could make my daughter get behind the wheel of a car for that long. A need I hadn’t been able to fill. “Oh, my poor baby,” I said. I remembered how quiet she’d been the night before in her bedroom. Had she known then? “She has to be so scared and confused,” I said. I thought of how she’d feel when she realized she’d left her phone at home. I could hardly bear to imagine her reaction.

“I feel terrible,” Emerson said.

“I don’t care about your damn feelings right now, Emerson,” I said. “All I care about is finding Grace. You had no right to keep this from me. Something that impacts Grace’s safety. You’ve—” I turned my face away from them. “I’m so furious with both of you! If anything happens to her, I’ll never forgive either of you.” I started for the kitchen and the telephone. “Who do we call?” I asked the air. “How do we find her?”

48

Grace

Washington, D.C.

I stopped at another gas station, bought a cheapy prepaid cell phone and made a deal with myself. If I couldn’t track down Anna Knightly at the Children’s Medical Center in an hour, I’d call that woman at the Missing Children’s Bureau and give her the number. One way or another, I was finding my mother today.

Finally, I saw a sign for the Children’s National Medical Center. I drove into a big underground garage and it was worse than driving on the highway. Cars were pulling out in front me and honking behind me, but I finally managed to get into a space.

At the entrance to the lobby, there was a sign that said you needed to show your ID, so I pulled out my driver’s license. The guard looked at it and, without even glancing at me, asked, “Where’s your supervising adult?”

My hands were shaking and I wondered if I looked guilty. “My mother and sister are inside,” I said.

He started yelling, “Hey! You!” at a guy somewhere behind me, and he must have been more interested in the guy than me, because he just nodded at me to walk through the entrance. I walked fast. I knew I’d lucked out.

The lobby was big and open, and I thought if I were a kid coming here to see a doctor, I’d be comfortable. It was colorful and didn’t feel at all like a hospital and nothing like the emergency room where they’d taken my father. But I wasn’t a kid and I wasn’t there to see a doctor. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what I was doing there. The lobby was filled with parents and children and doctors and nurses, everyone looking like they had someplace to go except me.

I spotted an information desk on one side of the lobby and walked up to the woman sitting behind it. She was African-American with gray hair and gray glasses and she smiled at me. I tried my best to look eighteen. I was afraid of getting kicked out.

“Hi,” I said. “I have to get an important message to someone. She’s the mother of a patient here. If I write a note can someone take it to her?”

“Patient’s name?” the woman asked. In spite of her smile, she sounded a little annoyed.

“Haley…” Did Haley have the same last name as her mother? “Her mother’s name is Anna Knightly. K-N-I—”

“I know how to spell it. Her daughter’s in the East Wing. Room 416. Give me your note and I’ll ask a volunteer to take it up when they have time. We’re short. Might be a while.” She held out her hand for the note I hadn’t written yet.

“I have to write it,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I found a flyer announcing a Fun Run for Children’s! The other side was blank and I sat down on one of the benches and pulled a pen from my backpack.

Now what?

“Mrs. Knightly,” I wrote. “My name is Grace Vincent. Please come to the lobby. I have to talk to you. It’s very important. I’ll be by the information desk. I have very long hair and am sixteen.”

I folded the note and took it back to the woman, who acted like she’d never seen me before. “This is the note for the woman in Room 416 in the East Wing,” I said.

She took it from me. “It’ll be a while,” she said again.

I went back to the bench. After about twenty minutes, a volunteer—an old man—went up to the information desk, picked up a vase of flowers and headed for the elevator. The woman behind the desk didn’t even hand him my note.

There were signs everywhere, and one of them said East Wing with an arrow pointing down a hallway. Don’t be a chicken, I told myself. I stood and walked down the hall to a bunch of elevators. I stood with a couple of doctors and a nurse and a woman with a little boy who leaned sleepily against her leg. The elevator came and we all got on. The nurse pushed the button for the fourth floor and I felt dizzy as we started going up. I hadn’t eaten in forever.

The nurse and I got off on the fourth floor. She kept walking down the hall, but I just stood there, frozen. The carpet had huge geometric patterns on it that only made me dizzier. A sign pointed the way to the rooms. Room 416 was to my right, but I couldn’t seem to move. I hadn’t noticed the hospital smell in the lobby, but it was definitely up here on the fourth floor.

Don’t think about Daddy. Just don’t.

“Can I help you?” a woman asked. She was probably a nurse. She wore a stethoscope around her neck and the fabric of her medical jacket was covered with dogs. “You look lost,” she said.

“No.” I managed to smile. “I’m good.” I started walking, pretending I knew exactly where I was going and why.

I reached 416 and stood near the open door. My heart was beating so fast I thought I might end up in the E.R. myself. There were people walking up the hallway toward me and I knew I couldn’t just stand there forever. I got up my courage and peeked around the doorframe as though I needed to slowly, slowly see whoever was in the room.

They’d just been names before. Not real people. Suddenly, though, reality smacked me in the face. A nearly bald girl was sitting in a huge bed. A woman sat in a chair next to her bed and they were looking at something in the girl’s lap. A book or magazine or something. The woman laughed. The girl smiled. In one single second, I felt the tenderness between the two of them. They were like a little clique that did not include me. All at once, I knew I didn’t belong in that room. I belonged nowhere.

The woman glanced in my direction and our eyes locked, just for a second. I stepped quickly away from the door and pressed my back against the wall. My heart was going so fast it was more like a buzzing in my ears than a beating. I didn’t know what to do.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the woman walk into the hallway.

“Hi,” she said.

I took a step away from the wall and turned toward her. Her smile was beautiful.

“Hi,” I said.

“Are you a friend of Haley’s from the unit?” She looked puzzled.

“I’m your daughter,” I said.

The woman’s smile disappeared. She took a step away from me. “What do you mean?”

“I just found out,” I said. “I live in Wilmington, North Carolina, and I found a letter…or some friends found a letter that this woman who was my mother’s midwife wrote to you, only never mailed.” I lowered my backpack from my shoulder and tried reaching into it for the folder but my hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t get a grip on it and I gave up. “She—the midwife—was apologizing for stealing your baby from the hospital the night I was born.”

The woman wasn’t following me and I didn’t blame her. She said nothing, a sharp line between her eyebrows. Her chest was rising and falling so fast I thought she might faint. I licked my lips and kept going. “She dropped my mother’s—the woman who I thought was my mother—she dropped her baby and killed it.”

I felt a knot tighten in my chest. It was all too much, and suddenly I missed my mother desperately. I wanted her to hold me. The mother who knew me. Not the stranger in front of me whose smile was totally gone, whose eyes told me she thought I was lying. Coming here had been a mistake. An impulsive crazy mistake and the smells of the hospital rushed over me like a wave in the ocean and I knew I was going to pass out. I leaned against the wall to keep from falling over. I was so far from home and my mother. It seemed like I’d have to cross half the universe to get back to her.

“Is this…has someone put you up to this?” the woman asked. “Is this some sort of cruel joke?”

I couldn’t speak. My throat was thick and I’d never felt so alone and so lonely. I shook my head.

The woman took my arm. “Come with me,” she said.

49

Tara

Wilmington, North Carolina

We stood in the kitchen, Emerson hunting on my laptop for the number of the Missing Children’s Bureau while I held the phone, ready to dial. Jenny stood near the island, biting her lip. I wanted to yell at both of them to get the hell out of my house, but I needed their help to find Grace. I didn’t look at them. I was holding on tight to my anger.

“Here’s the number,” Emerson said. “Oh, it’s a hotline number, not the office number.” She rattled it off and I dialed. I explained to the man who answered that I was trying to reach the bureau’s Alexandria office. I was careful what I said, although Emerson kept trying to put words in my mouth. “Shut up!” I said to her finally, then I apologized to the man and somehow convinced him to give me the office number. When I called there, though, I was dumped to voice mail.

“I need to speak with Anna Knightly,” I said. “Please have her—have someone—call me right away. This is extremely urgent.” I left both my cell and home number.

Emerson was trying to reach Ian again, but I knew he was unreachable when he was on the golf course. “Maybe we should call the police,” Emerson said after leaving another message for Ian. “They can be on the lookout for Grace’s car. They could have someone go to the Missing Children’s Bureau and wait for her to show up.”

“I’m going up there,” I said.

“You don’t know where she is, though,” Emerson said. “It’s better to stay here.”

“I’m going.” I grabbed my purse and headed for the garage.

“I’ll drive you.” Emerson ran after me. “You’re too upset to drive.”

I spun around. “I don’t want you near me!”

“You need me,” Emerson said, “and Grace is going to need Jenny. We’re driving you.”

It was as if we were flying instead of driving. I sat in the passenger seat, clutching my phone on my lap, so filled with fear and anger and anxiety that my limbs trembled. Behind me in the backseat, Jenny kept apologizing. Emerson, too. But I tuned them out, and for a couple of hours I didn’t speak at all except to leave my own message on Ian’s voice mail, telling him where we were and what was going on. Emerson kept trying to get me to talk to her, but all I could think of was Grace, who had to be feeling alone and upset and scared. I knew that was how she felt. It might have been the first time since she was small that I knew her feelings without being near her. The first time in so long that I felt that invisible connection to her. My blood was in her blood. My heart in her heart. I didn’t care what a DNA test might say. She was my daughter.

I didn’t want to think about Anna Knightly. When I’d been trying to figure out who had her child, I’d felt sympathy for her. She’d been a stranger to me. A name in a letter. I’d thought about what it would feel like to realize your baby was missing. Now I knew how it felt firsthand. Anna Knightly had another daughter, I thought. Let her be satisfied with that one.

I wished Grace were in the car with me right that instant. I’d hold her and tell her that no matter how poor a job I was doing at being her mother, I loved her. I’d do anything for her. Whether she wanted me to or not, I’d hold her so tight that no one would be able to pry her from my arms. Sometimes it was hard to express how much you loved someone. You said the words, but you could never quite capture the depth of it. You could never quite hold someone tightly enough. I wanted that chance with my daughter.

“Do either of you need to stop?” Emerson asked when the traffic slowed near Richmond.

“No,” I answered for both of us. I didn’t care if Jenny needed to stop. Jenny could burst for all I cared. “Just keep driving.”

Two wildly opposing emotions were at war inside me. Hatred toward Noelle that was spilling over to Emerson and Jenny, regardless of how irrational that might have been. And love for my daughter. “Oh, Grace,” I said out loud, although I hadn’t meant to.

Emerson reached over to rest her hand on my forearm. “She’ll be all right,” she said. “It will be all right.”

I turned my face away from her.

“It was my fault,” Jenny said from behind me. There were tears in her voice and I wondered how long she’d been crying back there.

There was plenty of blame to go around. Emerson and Ian for keeping this from me. Jenny for stupidly taking what she’d learned to Grace. Myself, for not knowing how to mother my daughter. For not being the sort of mom she could turn to when she learned this devastating truth. She would have turned to Sam. I could blame Mattie Cafferty, who took my husband from me and left me to cope alone. And, of course, I could blame Noelle for her criminal, unconscionable act. And yet…if Noelle hadn’t done what she did, I wouldn’t have my Grace.

My Grace.

My phone rang and I lifted it to my ear. “This is Tara Vincent.” My words spilled over one another.

“This is Elaine Meyers from the Missing Children’s Bureau, returning your call.”

“Yes! Thank you.” I pressed my hand to my cheek. “This is very complicated but my sixteen-year-old daughter is probably going to show up there looking for Anna Knightly and I need—”

“Pretty girl? Long hair?

“Yes. Is she there?”

“She was. But I explained to her that Ms. Knightly isn’t here. She was quite upset. She said she had information about a missing child.”

“Where did she go?”

“I have no idea. She wouldn’t leave her name and she said she had no phone. I was concerned about her.”

“Could she be…waiting around? Outside maybe?”

“No, I told her Anna’s at Children’s Hospital with her daughter and that she wouldn’t be back for—”

“What do you mean ‘with her daughter’?”

I felt Emerson’s quick glance.

“Her daughter is very ill and Anna’s at the hospital with her.”

“Could she…could my daughter… She knows Anna Knightly’s at Children’s Hospital?”

“I did mention it. But I don’t think—”

“Where is it. It’s in D.C., isn’t it?”

“On Michigan Avenue. But—”

Jenny was fast. She reached between my seat and Emerson’s to show me the address for Children’s Hospital on her iPhone.

“I’ve got it,” I said to the woman. “Please call me back if you hear anything more from her.” I hung up and turned to Jenny. “Can you get the directions?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I tapped my phone against my lips, thinking. “She wouldn’t go to a hospital, though,” I said. “You know how she feels about hospitals. I can’t imagine—”

“Should we call the police?” Emerson asked.

I shook my head. “Not yet,” I said. “Not until we’ve exhausted every other way to reach her.” I didn’t want the police between my daughter and myself. I wanted no one between my daughter and myself.

50

Anna

Washington, D.C.

I’d dreamed of this moment many, many times, yet what was happening now was nothing like my dreams. In my dreams, I’d seen the girl. Sometimes she was a toddler. Sometimes nine or ten. Occasionally this age: sixteen. This perfect age that fit reality. Yet there was one thing in each of those dreams that was missing in the here and now, and that was the instant recognition that this was indeed my daughter. My Lily. The child I’d carried beneath my heart. Sitting in the small lounge with Grace—and she seemed more like a Grace than a Lily to me—listening to her speak in a voice so quiet I had to lean close to hear her, I studied her lovely, heart-shaped face. She showed me the letter, her hands trembling violently as she pulled it from her backpack. She told me about the suicide of the midwife.

I read the letter and was still filled with disbelief. I was being suckered into something. There’d been so much publicity around the bone marrow drive. Bryan and I had been too open about Lily’s disappearance in our attempt to garner attention and sympathy for Haley’s plight. We’d al lowed Lily and our ordeal to be written about, talked about, embellished. Now someone had fabricated a letter, a girl, a story, all to mess with my mind. But why? Did someone think I had money? If so, they’d be wrong.

Where was the instinctive maternal bond I’d felt in my dreams? The girl looked nothing like me. Nothing like Haley or Bryan. Her eyes were large and brown, but the shape of them was off. How dare you dissect this child? I thought to myself. I felt her pulling back from me, shutting down, as if she was picking up on my ambivalence.

“When were you born?” I asked, determined to trip her up.

“September first, 1994.”

“Oh, really?”

She dug her wallet out of her backpack, her hands only slightly less shaky than they’d been a few minutes earlier. She pulled out her driver’s license and handed it to me. I stared at the date. September 1, 1994. It fit. It fit all too well. Could the license be a fake? I didn’t know how to tell.

I looked at her again. I was afraid to let myself hope. So afraid. I’d been disappointed before. Maybe the girl was Lily, but I wasn’t thinking, Let’s do a DNA test right this minute! Instead, I was thinking about her bone marrow. My reaction horrified me, but I couldn’t help what I felt. I wasn’t ready to think of her as my daughter. Rather, I saw her as a commodity. A way to save the life of the daughter I knew for sure was mine.

“Do your parents know you’re here?” I asked. If she was for real, someone would be worried about her.

“My father is dead,” she said. “And, no. My mother—the woman who thinks she’s my mother—doesn’t know I’m here. She doesn’t actually know anything about this yet. Her friend figured it out and hasn’t told her.”

Her story was growing so convoluted that I was beginning to think it must be true. No one could make this up.

“Where does your mother think you are?”

“I… Probably with my boyfriend in Chapel Hill. My ex-boyfriend.”

“You need to call her right away and tell her where you are,” I said.

“But she doesn’t even know about this.” She looked a little panicky. “She doesn’t know I’m not her daughter.”

“You still need to let her know where you are,” I said.

The girl licked her lips. “All right,” she said, though she made no move for her phone.

“Listen to me,” I said. “This is extraordinarily strange in so many ways. I don’t know you and you don’t know me, and in a…if things were different, we would slowly get to know each other and find out if you’re really my daughter, but right now, my daughter—” I almost said my real daughter “—Haley is very ill. She has leukemia. She’s a wonderful girl and she needs a bone marrow transplant to give her a chance to live. It’s her only chance. Only certain people can be donors and we haven’t been able to find a match for her.” My voice started to break; sometimes the emotion still caught me by surprise. “It’s possible, just possible that a sister might be a match.” I felt cruel. Whoever this girl in front of me was she had not asked for this. She hadn’t bargained for it. But I didn’t care. I wanted her tested. I needed to see if maybe, by some wild chance, she could be a match, whether she was Haley’s sister or not.

Grace swallowed and I could see how scared she was. What I was doing felt wrong and yet I couldn’t help myself. Haley was slowly dying.

“I’d like you to meet Haley, if you’re both willing,” I said. “Then you can decide if you want to be tested to see if you’re a match. It’s just a cheek swab. Doesn’t hurt at all. Only if you want. Your mother would have to give permission.” I sat back with a long sigh. The girl’s hands were folded together on her lap in a tense knot. “I don’t know what’s going on here, Grace,” I said, “but sometimes things happen for a reason and they’re very hard for us to explain.”

She lifted her chin at those words and I saw that they had meaning for her. “You believe that, don’t you?” I said softly. “That things happen for a reason?”

She nodded. “I want to believe it,” she said, though her eyes, which were nothing like Haley’s, gave away her doubt. But her words, so tender and heartfelt, touched me and I softened toward her.

“I don’t believe you’re my daughter,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense. My newborn baby had hair that was darker than yours, just like Haley’s. Like her father’s. I bet your hair was very light when you were born.”

“Brownish. It’s really more brown than this.” She touched her long, thick hair. “I get highlights put in it.”

“I doubt it’s as dark as my daughter’s would be.” I stood. “Do you need something to eat or drink?” I asked.

She shook her head. Hugged her arms. “I couldn’t,” she said.

“You’re nervous?”

“I hate hospitals.”

I cocked my head at her. “You’re brave to come here, then,” I said. “Let me talk to Haley first. You stay right here.” I worried that I’d frightened her, that she might take off. I wished I had a long rope and could tether myself to her while I spoke to Haley. “Please promise me you’ll stay right here,” I said. “And call your mother to tell her where you are and what’s going on. But please don’t leave. You don’t have to do the bone marrow thing. I just—”

“I won’t leave,” she said. “I came all this way. I won’t leave.”

“Where’d you go?” Haley asked when I walked back into her room.

“Well, Haley—” I stood at the end of her bed, leaning on the footboard “—something wild just happened.”

“You’re shaking.”

I was. I was making her whole bed rattle. I straightened up and smiled at her. “Did you notice the girl who was in the hallway a minute before I left your room?”

She shook her head.

“Well, there was a girl there. A teenager. And she claims to be Lily.”

Haley’s eyes widened. “Our Lily?”

“That’s what she says.”

Her mouth fell open. “Our Lily?” she asked again, this time in a whisper.

“I don’t know if she is or not, honey.” I still wouldn’t let myself feel hope. “I don’t know what to make of it,” I said. “She showed me a letter from a midwife…. Do you know what a midwife is?”

Haley shook her head.

“A woman who delivers babies. This one—the one who wrote the letter—delivered babies at home apparently. Anyway, I need to talk fast because I left the girl out—”

“Hurry, then!” She glanced toward the hallway. “Is she out there?”

“She’s in a little room down the hall.” At least, I hoped that’s where she was. I knew I’d scared her in half a dozen different ways.

I told Haley what I could remember from the letter and she stared at me, openmouthed.

“Holy shit,” she said.

“Yes,” I agreed. “Holy shit. The dates match up to when Lily disappeared, and this girl thinks she’s Lily. She drove up here from Wilmington because she thinks I’m her mother.”

“Is it her?” Haley asked.

“I remember Lily so well,” I said. “I remember her like someone painted her in my brain, and I don’t picture her growing up looking like this girl. And yet—”

“I want to meet her!”

“Are you sure? It’s going to seem weird, Haley. And you don’t know if she’s your sister or not. You have to keep that in mind. Not get your hopes up.”

“I definitely want to meet her. I’ve wanted to meet her my whole life.”

“But she might not be—”

“I want her to be Lily so much!” she said.

I remembered when she was diagnosed with leukemia this time, she told me she wished I had Lily so I wouldn’t be alone if she died. I’d been touched by her bravery. Her generosity. Yet I didn’t want her to feel that way. Not at all.

I reached for her foot where it was covered by the blanket. “You know that no one can ever, ever take your place, right?” I asked.

“Let me meet her, Mom,” she pleaded, shooing me away from her bed with her hands. “Go get her before she disappears again.”

51

Grace

I folded my hands in my lap and sat very still. As freaked out as I was about what might happen next, it was my mother who kept popping into my mind. When would she have figured out I was gone? When would she figure out I wasn’t in Chapel Hill? She would be so worried. She’d call Emerson then, maybe, and Emerson would tell her that I wasn’t really her daughter. My chest hurt just thinking about it and I pressed my hands together hard. My mother would feel totally alone then. No husband. No daughter. She’d think about her real baby, the one who died, and wonder how amazing that baby would have turned out. Probably brilliant, like her dad, and a bubbly social butterfly like her mom. Nothing like the girl they’d ended up with.

But my mother loved me and, right then, I wanted to be with her. I wanted to be able to let her know I was okay, but that I needed to work something out on my own. I was afraid to call her, though. I was going to be in so much trouble.

This Anna woman was cold. I’d expected something totally different. I’d expected her eyes to light up with joy when she heard who I was. I’d expected her to pull me into her arms and be filled with the kind of instant love all mothers had for their children. There’d been none of that. She was suspicious of me and all she really cared about was her other daughter, Haley. I was falling through the cracks between two worlds. My real mother—Anna—had long ago given me up for dead and focused all her love on her other daughter, while the mother who raised me was by now probably grieving for the baby she’d lost.

Mom. Why did I always push her away? She was worried about me. I knew that. She’d be seriously freaking out right now.

I pulled the phone from my backpack and dialed her number. It rang a couple of times before she picked up.

“Hello?” she said, and I could tell with that one word that she was a mess.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Grace! Grace! Where are you? Are you okay? Where are you calling from? You left your phone—”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I just wanted to let you know that. I have to do something and then I’ll—”

“Are you at Children’s Hospital?”

I didn’t know what to say. How could she know that?

“I’m on my way there with Emerson and Jenny,” she said. “Is that where you are? I love you, Grace. I love you so much. I’ve been so scared, honey.”

“Mom. You don’t have to come here. I’m—” I looked up to see Anna standing in the doorway. “I have to go,” I said, and flipped the phone closed.

“Was that your mother?” Anna asked. “You spoke with her?”

I nodded. The phone rang and I dropped it into my backpack.

“You don’t want to get that?” Anna asked.

I shook my head.

Anna smiled at me. She did have a really nice smile. “Haley would like to meet you, if you’re willing,” she said.

I stood. Anna put an arm around me as we walked into the hall. It felt like the arm of a stranger. She rested it lightly on my back, the way you’d guide someone you didn’t know well from one room to another. My mother’s voice echoed in my ears. I love you, Grace. I love you so much. I smiled a little to myself.

“My mother said she’s coming here,” I said.

“Oh, that’s very good,” Anna said. “We need to get some things straightened out, don’t we? How far away is she?”

“She’s in Wilmington…except she said she was already on her way, so I don’t know how close she is. My best friend and her mother are with her.” I pictured the three of them driving together.

“Here we are,” Anna said. We were back at the door to Haley’s room. “Come on in.”

I followed her into the room and stood just inside the door.

“Haley, this is Grace,” Anna said. “Grace, this is Haley.”

Haley was sitting cross-legged on the bed and she was hooked up to a bunch of bags and poles and wires. She had very short brown hair that had either been shaved that way or was just growing in.

“Hi,” I said.

“Wow, you are so not what I expected Lily to look like,” she said.

I had the feeling I was disappointing both of them. I clutched my backpack to my chest. “Well, I didn’t expect to have a sister, period.” I tried to smile again, but seemed to have lost the ability.

“And you may not have a sister,” Anna warned. “Grace’s mom is on her way here, Haley, so we’ll get some answers then. Right now I’m going to call your dad.” She glanced at me. “Why don’t you have a seat, Grace?” She pointed toward the couch across the room from Haley’s bed. I walked over to it and sat down, still hugging my backpack. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Anna said, and then I was alone with Haley. My phone rang again and I pulled it from my backpack and turned the ringer off.

“Maybe that’s your mother,” Haley said.

“That’s okay.” I wasn’t sure what to say to Haley. I felt sorry for her for being so sick. I knew she was a lot braver than I’d be, hooked up to all that stuff. “How do you feel?” I asked.

“Mom explained the whole thing about the midwife and all that drama,” she said, like I hadn’t asked her a question. Her eyes bored into me while she talked. “You look freezing.”

I was shivering, though I didn’t think it had anything to do with the temperature in the room. “I’m okay,” I said.

“Look under this techno bed,” Haley said. “Grab a blanket to wrap up in.”

I got up and pulled a blanket from the shelf beneath her bed. It was pale blue and soft and I wrapped it around my shoulders.

“Do you really think you’re my sister?” Haley asked.

“Did your mother tell you about the letter?” I reached into my backpack one more time and pulled out the letter. I handed it to her and watched her read it.

“Omigod,” Haley said when she finished the letter. “This is totally crazy! It would be so cool if it’s real, though. I mean, me and my mom have made it, like, our job to find Lily. I never expected her—you—to just pop up like this.”

I took the letter back, folded it in half and slipped it into my backpack.

“What are your parents like?” Haley asked. “The people who raised you? Did you ever feel like you didn’t belong?”

“All the time,” I said, although it wasn’t quite the truth, was it? I’d belonged to my father, just not my mom. “I never felt like ‘oh, I’m adopted’ or anything like that,” I said. “But I don’t get along with my mother at all.”

“What about your father?”

“He died in a car accident in March. One of my mother’s students—she’s a teacher—killed him because she was texting while she was driving.”

“Holy shit,” Haley said. “That’s so terrible!” A machine on one of the poles next to her bed started beeping and she turned off the sound with a push of a button, like it was no big deal. “I never really knew my father until now,” she said. “I mean, I knew who he was and everything, but he left when I was little. When I got sick this time, he sort of showed up. I actually like him. I mean, I’m pissed at how he wasn’t around for most of my life, even though he sent money and everything, but Mom says he was just really immature and he couldn’t take it when I got sick so he just pulled out of the picture. First Lily disappeared and my mom was sick and all that was hard for him to handle, and then I got sick and it was too much for him, which totally screwed up my respect for him. I mean, my mom didn’t have the luxury of walking out, right? But he’s back now and he’s trying to be a dad. He’s doing this big drive to try to find bone marrow donors for me.”

“He’s my father, too,” I said, still shivering beneath the blanket.

“If you’re Lily, then, yeah,” she said.

I thought of how that must feel to Haley. She finally got a relationship going with her father and then this strange girl shows up to claim part of him. “I didn’t ask for this,” I said. “I’m not trying to step on your toes or anything. I just need to—”

“Hey, chill,” Haley said. She was smiling. “If you’re Lily, we want you, okay? We’ve prayed to find you. Or, at least, I have. My mom doesn’t really pray, but I’ve been looking for you since I was a little kid.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Almost thirteen.”

I couldn’t believe she was more than three years younger than me. She was pale and a little puffy and it was clear she was sick, but she seemed so together. So confident and sure of herself, like Jenny. I already felt in competition with her and I’d known her five minutes. “You’re so…you’re not like me at all,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re very…you seem more like my mother. I mean the mother who raised me. You’re more like her than I am. You seem really positive and outgoing.”

Haley shrugged. “I’m not always so positive,” she said. “I can get majorly depressed. Like, I’ve been on antidepressants a million times. But I’ve got hope, with a capital H. That’s my middle name. I mean my actual middle name is Hope. I’ve had leukemia before and went into remission. I think this time, though, hope’s not going to be enough.” She glanced up at one of the bags hanging from the pole next to her bed. “This disease sucks.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Your mother said a bone marrow transplant could help you.”

“Only we can’t find a donor. She’s hoping that if you’re Lily, you might be a match.”

“I know,” I said.

“My mom always hoped she’d find Lily,” she said. “She looked for her everywhere. She never gave up looking for her. We went to Wilmington a bunch of times, just looking for someone who looked like me.”

“I’ve been there the whole time,” I said.

“What’s your life been like?” Haley asked.

“My life’s been…” I had to stop and think, the question catching me off guard. I thought of my house, always obsessively neat with the exception of my room. I thought of how Jenny and I redecorated our bedrooms during the summer, filling them with color and polka dots as we talked about Cleve and Devon and laughed our butts off. I thought of how Daddy and I would invent elaborate coffee drinks together. I remembered how people brought us food for weeks after he died. With an ache in my heart, I thought of how my mother always planned my birthday parties down to the color of the sprinkles on the cake. That’s the way she shows her love, Gracie. I thought of growing up with Jenny and Emerson and Ted and even Noelle as my extended family. Of Wilmington and everything I loved about it, from the Spanish moss hanging on the live oaks to the Riverwalk to the little park in my neighborhood. And suddenly, I couldn’t imagine my life without all of that. All of the good and the bad that made up my existence. It seemed so wrong to be glad that Noelle had stolen me, yet in that moment, I was glad.

How could I possibly explain all that to someone who didn’t know all the people and places in my world? “My life’s been, you know, the usual,” I said weakly. “Some good and some bad.”

“I hope you’ll get tested,” Haley said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to be, though. I mean, you just show up and meet your real family and they all grab you and go after your body parts.” She laughed and I wrapped the blanket even more tightly around myself.

“Your mother said just a cheek swab or something like that,” I said.

“Right. First it’s only the cheek. Then if you match up with your cheek cells, they look at your blood. And then if that’s a match, you have to have surgery to remove some of your bone marrow, but I don’t think it’s all that bad. Not as bad as what they’ll put me through. They’ll do chemo and radiation to kill off my whole immune system so I don’t reject the bone marrow. But it’s, like, my only chance.”

I thought of my father and the way I’d felt when I learned he died—how it seemed like there should have been something I could do to bring him back to us, if only I could think of what it was. I thought of the email I’d mistakenly sent to Noelle that might have caused her to take her life. This time, maybe there was something I could do to save someone. Something hard and horrible, but good and right. It would mean needles and scalpels and probably staying in the hospital overnight. But maybe I could save a life. My sister’s life.

The thing was, I wanted my mother with me before I’d let them touch me.

I wanted to hear my mother tell me that everything would be okay.

52

Anna

Oh, shit, I was afraid.

I sat near the hospital coffee shop and dialed Bryan’s cell phone number with trepidation so deep and wide I felt as though it might drown me. Bryan had only recently found the courage to move back into our lives. He was only now finding his footing with the two of us. Now this. I was afraid he would run again. Maybe stay in California. I reminded myself that he was not the man he’d been back when Lily disappeared. Not the man he’d been when Haley first got sick. He’d grown up. He was solid. Or was I kid ding myself? I worried that I was only imagining that he was the man I wanted him to be. An even greater worry right now was that I’d allow myself to believe the girl in Haley’s room was truly Lily and then have those hopes dashed yet again. I’d taught Haley never to give up hope, yet I knew the truth: hope could lead you down the garden path.

I’d dared to leave Haley and Grace together for the time it would take to make this call. I had to talk to him before Grace’s mother arrived. I just couldn’t hold on to this revelation alone any longer.

“Hey,” Bryan answered. “Everything okay?” Oh, the warmth in that voice! I was so afraid of losing that warmth. I was afraid that whatever Bryan and I had recaptured between us would be gone in a few moments’ time.

“Yes,” I said. Nothing was okay, of course, but I knew what he meant. He meant, Nothing’s changed for the worse with Haley, has it? And nothing had.

“Something unbelievable’s happened,” I said.

“Uh, unbelievably good or unbelievably bad?”

“A girl showed up at the hospital today claiming to be Lily.”

He said nothing and I wondered what the words meant to him. Was he as afraid of hope as I was?

“Who is she? What’s her game? Do you think all the publicity—”

“I don’t know.” I cut him off. “She has this letter with her.” I told him about the letter. About the date of birth on her driver’s license. “I don’t think anyone put her up to this,” I said. “But something doesn’t feel right about it. I can’t put my finger on it. Her mother is on her way here from Wilmington. Apparently, the girl—her name is Grace—found all this out from a friend and took off with out telling her mother. Her father is dead.”

He was quiet, taking it all in. “Have you spoken to the mother?” he asked finally.

“Not yet. Bryan, the girl’s willing to be tested to see if she’s a match.”

“Do you believe she’s really Lily?”

“I don’t know what to believe. I… Of course I want her to be but she doesn’t look like I imagined Lily looking. She doesn’t look like either of us and nothing like Haley. She’s beautiful and seems like a nice kid, but—”

“Where is she now?”

“With Haley.”

“You let her meet Haley?” His voice told me he didn’t approve, but I felt confident I’d done the right thing.

You still don’t really know your daughter, I wanted to say to him. “I explained it all to Haley. I told her my doubts. She wanted to meet her.”

“Look, I’ll get a flight back tonight,” he said. “The interview went great today and I have one scheduled with a higher-up tomorrow morning, but I’ll tell them I have a family emergency and need to—”

“No, don’t,” I said. “Stay there and do the interview. I can handle things here.”

“You’ve been handling everything alone for ten years,” he said. “I want to be there.”

“All right,” I said. “I’d better get back to the room. Call me when you know what time you’re getting in.”

I hung up the phone and walked back to Haley’s room, a small smile on my lips. He was coming home.

53

Tara

I must have dialed Grace’s number ten times from the car before she finally picked up.

“Stay on the phone with me!” I said to her. “Please. Just stay on until I get there.”

“I don’t have that many minutes, Mom. It’s one of those prepaid phones. As soon as you get here, I need you to give them permission to get a test to see if I’m a match for this girl who’s my sister. Do you…do you know about her? Haley? She has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant and they need to see if I’m a match.”

I was horror-stricken. What were they doing to my daughter? I had never thought of her as so vulnerable, so in need of me, as I did at that moment.

“Grace.” I kept my voice far calmer than I’d thought possible. We needed a lawyer. I wished Ian would check his damn voice mail. “Slow down, honey, please. I need to get there and talk to…the medical staff and everyone. You may feel as though you know these people but you don’t. We don’t. You are my daughter.” I bit off each word. “Do you understand that? And you do not have my permission for anyone to lay a hand on you. When I get there, we’ll sort everything out.”

Emerson took her eyes from the road to glance at me. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“She could die,” Grace said, but I knew that voice. She was afraid. She wanted me to say no. To protect her. I knew my daughter better than I’d realized.

“I’ll be there in… How close are we?” I asked Emerson.

“Very close,” Emerson said. “Depending on this damn traffic.”

“Minutes,” I said to Grace. “I’ll be there in minutes, honey.”

“Mom? I don’t know what to do.”

My eyes brimmed with tears. “I’ll take care of it, Grace. We’ll work this out together.”

I didn’t want to let her off the phone but she was gone before I could say another word. I turned off my phone and looked at Emerson.

“My God,” I said.

“What’s happening?” Jenny leaned forward from the backseat.

“It sounds like Anna Knightly’s daughter needs a bone marrow transplant and they want to test Grace to see if she’s a match.”

“You’re kidding!” Emerson said. “These people sound heartless.”

“You mean, Grace walks in and they see her as a bunch of cells instead of a person?” Jenny asked. “Oh, Mom, drive faster.”

“No one’s going to touch her without my permission, so don’t worry about that,” I said.

My phone rang and I saw Ian’s cell number on the caller ID. “Ian!” I nearly shouted into the phone.

“Tara, I’m so sorry you found—”

“Look, I’m mad at you, but right now just help me, all right?”

“This Knightly woman,” he said. “Don’t talk to her, Tara. Just get Grace and go. Have Knightly’s attorney contact me and we’ll deal with it from there. I’m going to call some people I know at the police department in Wilmington. But for right now, you just want to make sure Grace is safe.”

Get Grace and go. “Okay,” I said.

“I’m sorry. I know you must be—”

“I don’t want to tie up the line in case Grace calls me back,” I said.

“Okay, we’ll talk later.”

I hung up the phone and wiped my hand across my forehead. I was perspiring. “He said just to get Grace and go,” I said, as if that hadn’t been my plan all along. I thought back to how Grace had sounded on the phone. “She has to be so scared,” I said, then turned to Jenny. “What did I do wrong with her, Jenny?” My own vulnerability bubbled to the surface. “Why can’t I ever seem to reach her?”

“It’s just typical kids-not-getting-along-with-their-parents stuff,” Jenny said kindly.

“No, it’s not,” I argued.

“Oh, it is!” Emerson insisted.

I kept my gaze on Jenny. “You and your mom have a better relationship than Grace and I do,” I said. “I know that. I feel like I screwed it up somehow.”

“I don’t think you screwed anything up,” Jenny said. “Grace is just deep. She just feels everything more than most people and it makes it hard to get close to her sometimes.”

I still thought she was being kind. Sam had never had a problem getting close to her. I remembered Noelle’s eulogy at Sam’s memorial service. “Sam was a champion listener,” Noelle had said. “That’s what made him such a good lawyer. Such a good husband and father.” Her voice had broken in the hushed church. “And such a good friend.”

Such a good father, I thought now. He knew how to be still with Grace. Not like me. I always needed to be talking, moving, doing.

“There’s a sign for the hospital.” Emerson pointed ahead of us. “Once we get inside, do you want Jenny and me to come with you, or would it be better if we found the cafeteria and hung out there while you find Grace? Having us underfoot might just add to the confusion. What do you think?”

I would have loved to have Emerson with me for moral support, but I was only going to get Grace and go, as Ian had advised. We didn’t need any big scene with all four of us. “You go to the cafeteria,” I said, “but keep your cell on and I’ll call if I need you, okay?”

The hospital came into view in front of us, a huge geometric collection of glass and metal. My daughter was in there. I couldn’t believe she’d had the courage to set foot inside. To actually drive herself there. She was just deep, Jenny had said. Yes, she was. I wanted to know every millimeter of that depth. I wanted it not to be too late for us and I was so afraid it was.

54

Grace

Anna moved around Haley’s hospital room, rearranging books and remote controls and tissue boxes and drinking glasses, and Haley chattered about a movie she’d seen and I kept looking at the doorway. We were all waiting for my mother to show up. It would change everything, having Mom here. She would take charge, and I realized how much I depended on that—on my mother taking charge of things.

The three of us were talking about the most unimportant things—my school and Old Town Alexandria and what Wilmington was like, as though I was just someone who’d dropped by for a visit, not their daughter or sister.

I jumped every time I saw someone in the hallway. Finally, there she was. My mother. She barely looked like herself, she was so pale and frazzled. I jumped up from the couch, the blanket falling from my shoulders, and ran into her arms.

“Mom,” I said, and suddenly everything I’d been through in the past twenty-four hours—Jenny showing me the letter, the horrible drive through the dark rain, the search for Anna Knightly—hit me all at once. My leg muscles felt like mush, and I knew I was only able to stand because my mother was holding me up.

“Sweetie,” Mom said, her voice quiet in my ear. “My sweetheart. It’s okay. I’m here.”

I held on to her. “I’m sorry I left like that,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. Her eyes were wet. “None of that matters.”

I could have stayed like that for the rest of my life, wrapped safely in her arms, but I could feel Anna behind me and Haley staring at us from her bed. I pulled away from my mother.

“This is my mom,” I said to Anna.

My mother walked over to Anna, her hand outstretched. “I’m Tara Vincent,” she said.

“Anna Knightly,” Anna said. “And this is my daughter, Haley.”

My mother looked at Haley. “Hi, Haley.” She put her arm around my shoulders. “I’ve spoken with my attorney,” she said to Anna. “He’ll be in touch with you.”

Anna tilted her head to the side and I knew she didn’t like my mother’s attitude. “Could we talk for a minute?” she asked. “Please? Mother to mother?”

“We can’t just leave, Mom,” I said. I knew she didn’t get exactly what was happening. She didn’t realize there was a life-or-death situation going on in that room.

My mother looked from me to Anna. “All right,” she said, “but I want to talk to my daughter alone first.”

Anna nodded. I could tell she was afraid my mother would take me away. I wanted to leave. I did. But I wouldn’t. “There’s a lounge at the end of the hall,” Anna said. “It’s usually empty. Go ahead.”

My mother held my hand as if I were a little girl as we walked down the hall. As if I were her little girl.

If only I could be.

55

Tara

There was so much I wanted to say. I wanted to ask her a thousand questions about her fears and her confusion and to know everything she was thinking and feeling. I wanted her to know that she would always be my daughter, that I would never allow her to be taken from me and that her body was hers. She didn’t have to offer a single one of her cells to see if she was a match for the stranger in the hospital bed.

But I said none of it as we sat on the two love seats in the tiny room. I asked her no questions. I felt Sam in the room with us, holding me back. He would have listened to her without prodding. Without picking her brain. He knew how to love our daughter.

“I love you,” I said, and it turned out to be all I needed to say. She began to cry.

“I’m so sorry I just left like that,” she said again. “It was so stupid.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “All that matters is that you’re safe.”

“I wish I never found out you’re not my mother.”

“We’ll need a DNA test before I’ll believe that,” I said, “but a blood test will never change how I feel about you, Grace.”

She wound the end of her hair around her finger. “I get so mad at you,” she said. “I even hate you sometimes. And today I can’t even remember why I ever felt that way. I wanted to go see Cleve and you said no and I got so angry and now that seems really stupid.”

I nodded, just to let her know I was listening.

“Right now I’m not even thinking about Cleve,” she said. “He’s like the last thing on my mind.” She let go of her hair and leaned toward me. “I don’t know who I am, Mom.”

I wanted to tell her who she was. She was the sensitive writer in the family, the quiet girl who had so much to say on paper. She was the apple of her father’s eye and the thread that had always connected Sam and me, biology be damned. She was the beauty who, truth be told, looked like neither of us. She was the girl I wanted so much to get to know.

I struggled instead to find the most open-ended thing to say. The Sam thing to say. “You’re still Grace,” I said, and knew at once it had been exactly right. She wore a small frown as she stared at me, and I could nearly see the wheels turning in her mind.

“I don’t want to lose Grace,” she said. “Even though I spend so much time wishing I was…not me. Wishing I could be more like you.” She did? I had never once thought she wished she could be like me and I wanted to ask her why, but managed to keep my mouth shut.

“I always wished I could be more like Jenny. Everybody loves Jenny. I never know what to say around people and I just… I’m so different. I’m weird.”

No, you’re not, I wanted to say. How could I let that comment go unchallenged? But she kept going before I had a chance to respond.

“But it’s like all of a sudden I want to just be me, Mom,” she said. “I don’t want to be somebody else’s daughter. Haley is nice. She’s cool. But I suddenly feel like everybody wants me to save her life and—” She shook her head. “Please…can you make this all go away?”

I moved next to her on the love seat, my arms around her. “You and I share the same wish, Grace.” I smoothed my hand down the length of her hair. How long since she’d let me do that? “I wish I could make this all go away, too, but I don’t know that I can.” I was the one who fixed things. Who controlled things. Never had anything felt so out of my control. “The one thing I can promise you is that I will slow this train down, okay?”

“She could die if I don’t give her my blood marrow.”

I nearly corrected her but let the mistake stand. She seemed so small in my arms, a child who didn’t know bone marrow from blood marrow, and I would allow her to be that child for as many more hours as possible.

“Your baby died.” Her cheek was on my shoulder, her breath against my throat.

At some point, I knew that phantom baby would work her way into my heart, but she wasn’t there yet. “I’m not thinking about that baby,” I said. “I’m thinking about you.”

“Can I be with you when you talk to Anna? Please?”

It had been easy for Ian to tell me to get Grace and go.

Easy for me to think of doing exactly that before I’d set foot in that hospital room, where “Anna Knightly” turned from a mere name to a woman. A mother.

I hugged Grace closer to me. I knew she was afraid that Anna would somehow convince me to turn her over without a fight. Why was it that on this day I understood my daughter so well? Had I known her all along?

“Yes,” I said. “This is all about you and you can be with us.”

56

Anna

The woman, Tara, wanted Grace to be with us as we sat in the little room. I thought it would be better to leave her out of the discussion. She could stay with Haley while Tara and I talked, but Tara and Grace were a unit. Two against one. That’s good, I told myself. That’s the way it should be. If Grace turned out to be my Lily, I wanted her to have had the sort of life where she was loved and protected. Yet Grace seemed so fragile that I wasn’t sure she should be privy to our conversation. Still, it wasn’t my call.

Grace looked more like Tara than she did like me, that was for sure, but frankly, she didn’t look much like either of us. She and Tara sat side by side on the love seat, holding hands. Both of them probably had brown hair beneath the blond highlights and both of them had brown eyes, yet their features were dissimilar. I couldn’t help but study them, comparing one nose to the other. The shape of their lips. The curve of their eyebrows.

I couldn’t get past my lack of feeling for Grace except as a possible bone marrow donor for Haley, and that upset me. I never expected to feel so flat at the prospect of seeing my lost daughter in front of me.

“I don’t understand how all this happened,” Tara said. “Were you living in Wilmington?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same question for the past couple of hours,” I said. “And no, I was living here, but I was a pharmaceutical rep and I often traveled to Wilmington.” I remembered back. I needed to figure this out for myself. “I was about thirty-five weeks pregnant with Lily on my last trip down there. Bryan, my husband, was stationed overseas at the time. While I was in Wilmington, I went into premature labor and delivered Lily down there. She was already six pounds three ounces and healthy. I was having trouble with my blood pressure, though, and a few hours after Lily was born, I had a stroke and slipped into a coma.”

“Oh, my God,” Tara said.

“They transported me to Duke,” I said. “Bryan was still in Somalia, trying to get permission to come home, but of course I was out of it and had no idea what was happening. When Bryan got home, he stayed in a hotel near Duke. I guess it was a terrible time for him.” It was something I rarely thought about, how incredibly difficult that period must have been for Bryan. “Our home was up here in Alexandria. Our newborn baby was in Wilmington. And I was in a coma in Durham. He called the hospital in Wilmington to ask about Lily, and they told him she wasn’t there. That she must have been transferred with me. Bryan tried to reach the EMTs who transferred me, but no one had a record of a baby being moved with me. She—” I looked at Grace “—she had just vanished along with any record of her birth. Bryan didn’t know the name of the doctor who delivered her. It was all a big mess. I was in a coma a little more than two weeks. I’d actually had very little damage from the stroke, thank God. My left side was weak. My vision and speech were a little off. My left hand is still not all that strong.” I flexed my fingers. “My memory was worthless. I couldn’t remember any doctors’ names, either. The only thing I remembered was that I’d had a beautiful baby and I wanted her back.”

“I’m sorry,” Tara said, but I saw her tighten her hand around Grace’s as if she had no intention of ever letting her go.

“When I was well enough to travel,” I continued, “we went to Wilmington. Lily would have been about seven weeks old by then. We worried that someone thought Lily had been abandoned, which in a way she had been, and that they’d moved her to foster care, so we searched through the foster system.”

“How terrible for you,” Tara said, but she was still clutching Grace’s hand hard.

“I saw the letter your midwife wrote to me,” I said. “I… It’s hard to take it all in. Did you have any idea?”

“None,” Tara said. “Noelle died recently….” She looked at Grace. “Did you tell her?”

Grace nodded.

“She committed suicide and my friend and I found the letter and we began searching for the ‘Anna’ Noelle was writing to. We finally figured out it was you, but we didn’t know whose baby she…whose baby died. We never in a million years thought it was mine.”

“Didn’t you see your baby…I mean, wouldn’t you know if your baby suddenly looked different?” I asked.

“It was the middle of the night when she was born and my labor had been very difficult. When Noelle brought her to me in the morning, I guess she’d already…made the substitution, because that baby was definitely Grace.”

“I don’t think much of your midwife,” I said.

“She did a terrible thing,” Tara said. “But it’s hard for me to let it define who she was.”

“Tell her about the babies program,” Grace said softly.

“Would you like to tell her?” Tara asked. “You’re more involved with it than I am.”

“She started an organization to help babies…preemies and poor babies and sick babies,” Grace said. “She won the Governor’s Award for it, but she wouldn’t accept it.”

I couldn’t look at her as she spoke. I was so afraid of attaching to her. Instead, I looked at Tara. “Maybe this is why,” I said, sweeping my hand through the air to take in the three of us and our predicament. “Maybe she felt she didn’t deserve any awards.”

“Could be,” Tara agreed. She put her arm around Grace. “I think we need a DNA test,” she said. “And I think we’d both better lawyer up. I don’t mean that in an adversarial way, but we—”

“I agree completely,” I said. “We all need to know what we’re dealing with. But I did explain to Grace earlier about Haley’s need for a bone marrow donor. She’s extremely ill. She’s—” I shrugged, giving into the word “—she’s terminally ill. And Grace agreed…”

“Grace didn’t know what she was agreeing to, Anna,” Tara said. “I’m sorry, but I have to put the brakes on right now, okay? Let’s take things a little more slowly. I’ll have my lawyer contact yours and see what timeline they recommend for the DNA test and then go from there.”

I felt like jumping from my seat and barring the door. “In a normal world, that would make sense,” I said. No tears. Please no tears. Tara was a cool customer and one thing I’d learned in my line of business was the need to stay calm. Still, I couldn’t keep the tremor out of my voice. “Please understand, Tara. I don’t know if Grace is Lily…” I looked at Grace. “I’m sorry to speak about you in the third person,” I said. “I just don’t know, but what if she is? And what if she’s a match for Haley? And what if we find that out too late? We haven’t been able to find a donor and a sibling has a one in four chance of being a good match.”

Tara shook her head. “You’re asking a lot of her,” she said. “That decision will just have to wait.”

“I want to do it,” Grace said. She looked at her mother. “I have to.”

“No, you don’t, honey. You don’t have to do anything.”

“I want to,” she repeated.

Please let her, I thought.

I saw Tara weaken. A lawyer would say to wait, I was sure of it, but this was different. This was two mothers. Two daughters.

“All right.” Tara gave in. “If you’re sure.”

57

Emerson

Jenny’s ice cream sundae had melted into a mocha-colored soup in her bowl and she pushed the soft liquid around with her spoon. My salad was practically untouched. We sat by the window in the cafeteria, surrounded by the chatter of doctors and nurses and visitors, but Jenny and I were in our own little bubble.

Maybe we should have gone with Tara to the girl’s room. I told myself that giving them privacy had been for the best. It was going to be confusing enough as it was; adding two more people to the mix could only make it messier. But I’d been glad Tara hadn’t wanted us with her. I didn’t think I could stand to watch her go through it all. I felt so guilty. Guilty for not telling her the moment I suspected that Grace was Anna Knightly’s child. Guilty that it was my daughter who hurt Grace with the truth. And I was tormented by the thought of how Tara felt at that moment.

I could imagine the conversation between Tara and Anna Knightly. Two mothers fighting over their daughter. Of course, Grace would always be Tara’s. Anything else was unthinkable. Yet Anna’s baby had been stolen from her. How could she not demand at least a part of that child’s life back?

Jenny pushed her bowl of ice cream soup away from her. “I am so sorry, Mom,” she said once again. I’d lost track of how many times she’d apologized.

“Look,” I said, moving my salad aside, “you screwed up by not telling me you overheard. I screwed up by not talking to Tara right away. But none of that would change the fact that Noelle did what she did and now everyone has to deal with the consequences. That’s what you and I need to focus on. Helping Tara and Grace handle what’s coming.”

“I don’t want her to move away and be part of some other family and live up here and—”

“I doubt any of that will happen,” I said. “Grace is sixteen and she’ll have a say in any decision. And you don’t think Tara would say, ‘Oh, here, she’s yours,’ do you?”

“What would you do if you were in Tara’s place right now?” Jenny asked.

I blew out a breath and looked up at the ceiling. “I would give the other woman—Anna Knightly—I would give her my deepest sympathy, but I would do just what I hope Tara is doing. Get Grace out of here and let the lawyers handle everything.” I was worried, though. Jenny and I had debated over getting something to eat because we thought Tara would call us within minutes. Now, nearly forty minutes had passed. What was taking so long?

“How would you feel in Grace’s shoes right now?” I asked.

She gnawed on her lip for a moment. “I’d want to get to know the people,” she said. “My other family. But I wouldn’t want them to try to take me away from you and Dad. I absolutely wouldn’t let them. And I’d feel sad that your baby died that way. That’s so awful. Poor Tara.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s unbearable to think about.”

“I just can’t stand how Grace must be feeling right now.”

“I know exactly what you mean.” I looked her in the eye. “They’re really going to need our support, Jen,” I said.

“I think we should have gone with Tara to the room,” she said.

My daughter was braver than I was. “You want to be with Grace?” I asked.

Jenny nodded.

“All right.” I got to my feet. “Let’s go find them.”

58

Grace

Mom was being her usual self, chatting up Haley and Anna as we waited on the couch in Haley’s room for a nurse to come swab my cheek. Someone had brought in another chair so everyone could sit and I was still cold, even though I knew the temperature in the room was fine. I had the blue blanket wrapped around my shoulders again and it felt like armor. I didn’t know what to hope for. If I was a match, I was afraid of what would happen to me next. If I wasn’t a match, Haley could die. When I thought about it that way, I knew I had no choice.

My mother was just as nervous as I was. She was talking a mile a minute, which wasn’t all that unusual, and within ten minutes she knew everything there was to know about the neighborhood where Haley and Anna lived in Virginia and what Haley liked in school and all that typical stuff. She was acting like the always-on Tara Vincent, but her eyes were darting between Haley and Anna and the open door of the room and she had moved her chair right next to mine and hadn’t stopped touching me since she showed up at the hospital. I was glad of that. I belong to her, I wanted to say to Anna. I know I’m your baby and it wasn’t fair someone ripped me off, but my mom raised me and I belong to her, okay?

The whole time my mother was talking, Anna and Haley kept staring at me like I was a peach in the grocery store and they were trying to decide if they wanted to take me home with them or not. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Everyone please stop staring at me,” I said. Mom moved closer to me on the sofa, but Anna and Haley just laughed.

“We can’t help it,” Anna said.

“I would so seriously like some of that hair,” Haley said.

I wondered if I could give her some of it. Have it cut and donate it to the Locks of Love program so they could make it into a wig for her. Could you specify who you wanted to receive your hair?

While I was thinking about how I could donate my hair, Emerson and Jenny suddenly showed up in the doorway.

“Knock, knock,” Emerson said. “We just wanted to see how Tara and Grace are doing.”

Anna stood from her chair like someone had poked her with a stick, and Haley suddenly sat up straight in her bed.

“Holy shit,” she said.

Then everything turned upside down.

59

Noelle

Wilmington, North Carolina

1994

She’d had taxing deliveries before, scary deliveries where a birth she’d expected to proceed without complications suddenly turned into something that made her pulse race. But Tara’s delivery of Grace would forever remain one of the most frightening experiences of her professional life.

Tara had called early that morning to tell her that her contractions had started, so Noelle didn’t take her morning cocktail of drugs for her back pain. Instead, she put pinches of turmeric between her cheek and gum and made a thermos of red clover tea, without much hope of relief. There was something to be said for herbal remedies in childbirth, but they were failing her when it came to her back. Her pain was worse than ever these days. The only thing that helped were the drugs, and she blessed the inventors of Percocet and Valium.

With each hour of Tara’s long, grueling labor, Noelle’s back seized harder until she occasionally had to mask her tears of pain, not wanting Tara or Sam to worry about her when they needed to be concentrating on themselves. Her own concentration was split between the task at hand and the pills she had in her purse. Just one Percocet, she thought to herself over and over again. Just enough to take the edge off. But she fought the need for the drugs and kept on going.

Around four in the afternoon, Emerson called to say that her water had broken and a neighbor was driving her to the hospital. Ted was in California at a Realtors’ convention and she was facing labor alone. She cried on the phone, and Noelle felt torn in two.

“Ted’s on his way to the airport,” Emerson said. “He’ll get the first flight out, but he has to change planes in Chicago. It’s going to take him forever to get here.”

“You’re in excellent hands, honey,” Noelle assured her. Without Ted or her two closest friends by her side, Emerson would suffer emotionally, but medically, she’d get good care and that was what mattered most right now. Everything had to go well for her. After the two lost babies, Noelle couldn’t bear the thought of Emerson having anything less than the smooth delivery of her healthy baby girl.

She kept in touch with her by phone, comforting her and cheering her on as she labored. Once Tara gave birth and she was certain both mother and baby were stable, she’d talk to Tara and Sam about bringing in the postpartum doula she’d been working with for the past couple of years. Tara knew Clare Briggs and would be comfortable with her. Then, if Emerson was still in labor, Noelle could run over to the hospital to be with her.

Late that night, while Ted was stuck in Chicago and Tara was fighting fear and pain, Noelle called the hospital and learned that Emerson was having an emergency C-section. Oh, how she wanted to be there to hold her sister’s hand! She kept in touch with the hospital—she knew nearly every nurse in the unit—and she breathed a sigh of relief when Jenny was born and both the baby and Emerson were reported to be healthy and stable.

She poured apple juice for Tara, Sam and herself, and between Tara’s contractions they toasted the birth of Jenny McGarrity Stiles. Sam alone knew her relationship to that baby. He squeezed her hand as she sat on the edge of their bed. Noelle couldn’t wait to see her niece, but first she had a baby to deliver.

Midwifery was always physically taxing. The bending, leaning, twisting and supporting were part of the process, and for the first time Noelle wasn’t sure she’d make it through. The red-hot torture in her lower back wouldn’t let up and she once again toyed with the idea of taking one of her pills. Just one. She could almost hear them calling to her from her bag in the kitchen. She’d be more effective if she could move with less pain, she told herself, but she knew better. She knew the danger. This delivery was too risky. She was dealing now with posterior arrest: the baby was stuck and she knew her only option might be to transport Tara to the hospital for Pitocin to strengthen her contractions. Tara wept at the idea. “Your healthy baby’s more important than a home birth,” Noelle said, but she assured her they would try everything else she could think of first. She wanted to separate Tara’s actual need for transport from her own longing to be in the hospital near Emerson and her baby, as well as her desire to have this delivery behind her so she could take something for her back. She and Sam worked together, physically supporting Tara, changing her position on the bed, walking her around the room, giving her tincture of cohosh and other herbs—in short, doing everything she could think of to help the little girl who was trying to be born.

With only one option left to her short of transport, Noelle attempted to manually rotate the baby. The delicate maneuvering seemed to take forever, though she knew it must have seemed far longer to Tara. Noelle wished she’d had an assistant—she needed four hands to manage the rotation. Maybe five. She let out an enormous sigh of relief when the baby finally turned into position, her fetal heart tones strong and reassuring. A short time later, the infant slipped into the world and Noelle wasn’t sure which of the four of them in that hot, dark room was the most exhausted or the most relieved.

She was bathing the infant in the kitchen when Sam came into the room to watch. “She’s all right now, isn’t she?” he asked. “Tara?”

“She’ll be fine,” Noelle said, and she knew that when Tara had briefly lost consciousness after the delivery, he’d been afraid. She knew how much he loved Tara. She saw it every time she was in the same room with them, and she felt both happiness for the two of them—two people she loved—and a searing envy that had never eased up. Now they had a child to bind them together even more tightly. She was glad she was only a couple of months away from marrying Ian. For the first time in her life, she had someone to fantasize about the future with. Her longing for children, for an out-in-the-open family tied together by blood, would someday soon be a reality.

She sent Sam back into the bedroom to be with Tara while she finished examining the baby and calling Clare Briggs to come over. Then she wrapped the baby in warm receiving blankets, resting her carefully on a thick towel at the rear of the kitchen counter as she rummaged in her purse for her pill bottles. Finally. This delivery was over. Clare would be here in a few minutes. She could afford some relief now.

She carried the infant back into the bedroom and found Sam and Tara huddled together on the bed. Tara smiled tiredly and reached for her baby.

“We’re going to name her Noelle,” Sam said. She knew in that instant that he’d forgiven her for the night on the beach, but although she was touched by the gesture, she couldn’t let it happen. It was so wrong. There were moments when her guilt from that night could still find her, and this was one of them.

“Oh, no, you’re not,” she said. “Promise me you won’t saddle this baby with my name.”

She must have sounded even more vehement than she felt, because they quickly backed off and she was relieved. She couldn’t allow Tara, in her ignorance, to name her baby after her.

Clare arrived, bustling into the house with the self-confident attitude that always put new parents at ease. Noelle made sure everyone was as comfortable with one another as possible, then left for the hospital. She was beyond exhaustion, but she couldn’t wait to check on Emerson and see her niece. This was a child who might actually look like her. Wouldn’t that be something? She only hoped she wouldn’t look too much like her. Not enough to bring attention to the fact.

She took another Percocet before leaving Sam and Tara’s house. The past twenty-four hours had simply been too grueling for her back. By the time she was driving to the hospital, she felt the drugs soften the prickly edges of her pain. The muscles in her back loosened ever so slightly and her clenched jaw relaxed. She felt deliciously floaty as she walked from her car to the entrance of the women and new born unit. The relief from pain combined with exhaustion and the excitement of being minutes from seeing Emerson’s baby made her feel almost giddy.

She loved the unit at night when it was dimly lit and nearly silent. The unit was broken into pods of four rooms each. A small nurses’ station designed for one or two nurses sat at the center of each pod.

Noelle found the correct pod for Emerson. Jill Kenney, a nurse Noelle had known for years, was bending over one of two clear plastic bassinets next to the counter, changing the diaper of a caramel-skinned baby. She looked like she’d had as long and hard a night as Noelle and she gave her a tired smile.

“Hey, Noelle,” she said quietly. “I bet you’re here to see the Stiles baby. I thought you’d scrub in for that one. The mom’s your best friend, isn’t she?”

“I had a home birth of another friend.” Noelle returned the smile. “I’m going to ask them to time their babies a little better next time.” Standing inside the doorway of the pod, she felt as though she were in a dream. It was a pleasant, welcome sensation. Her back seemed to be made of cotton, soft and yielding and, finally, pain-free.

“She named her Jenny.” Jill straightened up from the bassinet and moved to the sink to wash her hands. “Not Jennifer. Jenny. I think that’s cute.”

Noelle walked toward the bassinets. “Who are these two?” she asked.

Jill sat down at the counter. She rubbed her temple with her fingers, her face pale against her short dark hair. “Well, this one’s mom needed a break.” She pointed to the darker-skinned infant.

“Do you feel all right?” Noelle asked.

“Actually, no.” Jill frowned. “Migraine. Therese is going to relieve me soon and I’m going home. It’s been wild tonight, too. It’s always that way, isn’t it?” She glanced at one of the monitors on the counter, then pressed a couple of buttons on her keyboard before looking up at Noelle again. “The time you don’t feel well is the time all hell breaks loose.”

“That seems to be the way it goes.” Noelle looked at the second bassinet. “Why’s this other babe out here?” she asked.

“Oh, that one’s really tragic.” Jill said. “Mom stroked out and is in a coma.”

“Damn.” Noelle peered into the bassinet. The baby’s wispy brown hair fringed her little pink knit hat. She was six and a half pounds, Noelle thought—she could judge a baby’s weight by looks alone—and her color was excellent. Whatever had befallen her mother didn’t seem to have had an adverse effect on her.

“They’re getting ready to transfer her mother to Duke.” Jill punched another few buttons on the keyboard. “I don’t know if they’ve decided whether to move the baby with her or send her to the peds unit.”

“Prognosis on the mom?” Noelle rested a hand against the counter. She felt a little unsteady on her feet and was looking forward to sitting down in Emerson’s room.

Jill shook her head, then winced as though the motion had done nothing to help her migraine. “Doesn’t look good right now,” she said, “and the dad is deployed, do you believe it? Mom was four weeks early and traveling here on business, so there’s no family. We’ll call Ellen first thing in the morning unless they take the baby with the mother tonight.”

“Good,” Noelle said. Ellen was the social worker for the unit. “So which room is Emerson’s?”

Jill pointed to the door behind her. “She’s sleeping, but I was about to change the baby and give her a bottle. Would you like to?” She looked so hopeful, Noelle laughed.

“You really need to go home to a dark room, don’t you?” She smiled with sympathy. She knew all about pain. Her own had eased up nicely. She loved the floaty sensation that now filled her head.

Jill looked at her watch. “Can’t wait. Therese’ll be here any second.”

“I’ll take care of the Stiles baby,” Noelle said. She rested a hand on Jill’s shoulder. “Hope you get out of here soon.”

Emerson was sleeping soundly in the softly lit, quiet room. She looked beautiful and Noelle was filled with tenderness as she leaned over to kiss her forehead. “You finally have your baby, Em,” she whispered. “Your little girl.” She wished she could have been here for her. She hated that Emerson had felt alone and deserted at such a difficult time.

She set the bottle Jill had given her on the small table near the recliner. Then she scrubbed her hands at the sink and moved to the bassinet.

For a strange moment of déjà vu, she felt as though she’d already seen this baby. There was the little pink hat fringed by honey-brown wisps of hair. The delicate facial features. The six and a half beautiful pounds. It took her only a fraction of a second to realize it had been the baby at Jill’s station she’d seen a moment ago, not this little one. Only a fraction of a second, but long enough to let her know she was more out of it than she’d thought.

“Hello, precious,” she whispered, beginning to change the little diaper. The baby—Jenny—began to stir, a small frown on her face, a tiny whine coming from her throat. Noelle’s eyes filled and she bit her lip to stop it from trembling.

When Jenny was clean and diapered, Noelle lifted her from the bassinet, then sat down in the recliner, the baby cradled in her arms. Jenny’s eyes were starting to blink open and closed, the frown deepening between her barely-there eyebrows, and her tiny perfect lips parted in the way Noelle knew preceded a good howl of hunger. She teased the baby’s lips with the nipple and felt a little surge of pride when Jenny started sucking without much prompting at all. The infant’s hand rested against her own, each finger a tiny sculpture in perfection. Noelle bent low to kiss her forehead. She’d held hundreds of babies in her life, and for the first time she whispered the words I love you to one of them.

60

Anna

Washington, D.C.

2010

When the girl showed up in the doorway, I took her in with one glance and that was all that was necessary for my heart to lurch toward her. My body, though, stayed frozen in shock. I stood next to Haley’s bed, one hand on her tray table, the other pressed to my chest. Tara moved toward the girl and her mother. She was speaking, words that may as well have been a foreign language. Making introductions that were no more than white noise. Haley grasped my hand where it rested on her table, pressing her fingertips into my wrist and I knew that, like me, she no longer saw Grace and Tara. She didn’t see the other woman, either. All either of us could see was the girl.

The white noise of Tara’s voice suddenly stopped and she was staring at us.

“Mom,” Haley said. “Say something.”

“What’s going on?” Tara asked.

If Haley and I had seen this girl on the street on one of our trips to Wilmington, we would have chased her for blocks, for miles, until we caught up with her. We’d been looking for her for so long. We would have known we’d found her, just as we knew that now.

“Did the midwife—” I had to clear my throat “—Noelle… Did she deliver you, too?” I asked the girl, although I already knew the answer. The woman in the doorway put an arm around her, tugging her close.

“No,” she said. “Jenny was born in the hospital, delivered by an obstetrician.”

She was lying. She had to be. My legs were rubbery, but I took two steps toward the night table and picked up the photograph of Haley with the Collier cousins in the Outer Banks. I held it with both hands as if it were very fragile and carried it toward the woman and girl in the doorway.

“This is my sister-in-law and her daughters,” I said, holding it toward the woman. “Haley’s cousins. Look at them.”

I knew what they were seeing in the photograph. Four girls with round dark eyes. Nearly black hair and fair skin. Chins that receded ever so slightly. Noses a hairbreadth too wide to be beautiful. I stepped away from them, back to Haley’s side, because I was afraid I would touch the girl. I would try to pull her into my arms. Right now, I had to settle for breathing the air she was in. Finally, I thought. Finally.

Tara and Grace moved next to the woman and Tara touched the frame where it shivered in her hand. “Oh, my God, Emerson,” she said when she saw the picture. “How can this be?”

“Tara,” the woman said, as if asking her friend to fix something that had moved entirely out of her control. “It can’t be,” she said. “It isn’t.”

I watched all four of them stare at the photograph. I watched as the truth sank in. I held Haley’s hand, waiting for the moment I could take my other child, my firstborn daughter, into arms that had ached to hold her for sixteen years. In that girl’s beautiful dark eyes, I saw confusion and fear and it broke my heart.

“Jenny,” I said. “Is that your name? Did I get it right?” I hadn’t really heard the introductions.

The girl slowly raised her gaze from the photograph. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said.

Grace looked at her mother. “I’m not…?”

It took Tara a moment to shake her head. “I don’t think so.” She touched the other woman’s shoulder. “Em,” she said, “is this possible? What do you remember?”

“I had her in the hospital,” the woman said again. “It’s impossible. It’s ridiculous.”

“When is your birthday?” I asked Jenny.