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.