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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, finally, I got it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Grace who belonged to none of us.



PART THREE

GRACE





33

Grace


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, Gracie, that’s so cute!”

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

“Thanks,” I said.

“What shoes will you wear?”

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

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

“Not yet.”

“Want me to make—”

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

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

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

“Okay,” she said. “Have a good day.”

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

R u home yet?

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

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

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

Helping Mom with something. Later.

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

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