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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, nothing like that,” I said.

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

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

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

“No idea,” I said.

“What does Ted say?”

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

“I don’t think we can,” Tara said.

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

“But you do know. We know.”

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

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

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

“You’re not alone with it, sweetie.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



18

Noelle


UNC Wilmington

1988

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m the RA. Noelle.”

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

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

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

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

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

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



19

Anna


Washington, D.C.

2010

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

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

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