But then that moment was over, the fantasy shattered, and I remembered that in real life, I was in love with a man I couldn’t survive and bound to a man I couldn’t escape. I remembered that I collected guns and counted scars, and that maybe I wouldn’t be the best influence on someone as impressionable as Anne’s young daughter was sure to be.
“Well, I guess that’s that.” Cam crushed his empty soda can and screwed the lid back on the bottle of whiskey. “Name-tracking is a no-go, unless Anne has some more accurate information for us.”
“How long do you expect her to sleep?” I asked, and he glanced at his watch.
“It’s already been almost two hours and I gave her a small dose. She could wake up anytime.”
I stood and headed for the bedroom, and he called after me. “Careful. Mama bears wake up cranky.” Especially those who wake up missing their cubs. I peeked into the bedroom and found Anne stirring slowly, sluggishly, on the bed. She was waking up.
I sat on the edge of the mattress, and when I put a hand on Anne’s arm, she opened her eyes. She blinked several times, then sat up slowly and stared at me, her hair mussed as if she’d slept for days. Her nap obviously hadn’t been very restful.
“What happened?” she croaked, eyes still red from crying.
“Cam sedated you.”
“Bastard…” she mumbled, pushing tangled hair back from her face. She cleared her throat, then met my gaze again. “Hadley?”
I glanced at my lap, then made myself meet her gaze. “We’re still working on it.”
“I don’t understand. I left Kori a message directly asking her to bring Hadley back. She can’t ignore that.”
“I know. We don’t think she’s listening to her messages. Cam thinks she’s been ordered not to.” I sighed, then plunged into the rest of it. “Cam tried to track her, but…something’s off about her name, Anne. Whatever’s going on, you need to tell us. We can’t find her if we don’t have all the information.”
“I can’t…” She scrubbed both hands over her face, then left them there, shoulders shaking with silent sobs.
I pulled her hands away from her face and made her look at me. “You don’t have any choice, Annika. We’ve tried everything we could think of. Cam tried to track her using Shen’s last name, then yours. He even tried his own, but that didn’t work, and neither did giving her a middle name. We know she’s not his, so whatever you’re hiding…well, it can’t be worse than that, right?”
Anne frowned, momentarily distracted from her tears by obvious confusion. “What? Why would she be Cam’s?”
I watched her expectantly, waiting for comprehension to sink in, and when it didn’t, I had to actually say what I’d been avoiding discussing. “Anne, I know about the two of you. At the party. Six years ago.” Her eyes widened, and I barreled on. “Kori told me. So, on the off chance that Hadley was his, Cam tried giving her a paternal middle name, then tracking that name. But it didn’t work. So we need to know—who is her father? Or at the very least, what’s her real name? The whole thing, Anne.”
For a moment, she looked as if she was actually going to answer, as hard as that might be. Then she burst into tears instead.
Cam’s footsteps echoed in the hall while I tried to calm her down, and when he appeared in the doorway, she saw him and cried even harder. “Anne,” he said, as I pulled her gently to her feet and guided her toward the door, “I know you’re upset, but we don’t have time for this. Actually, we don’t know how much time we have. We don’t know much of anything, and we’re not going to until we find her. So we need you to calm down and tell us everything you know. Everything.”
She nodded unsteadily and wiped her face with the tissue I handed her, then glanced back and forth between us, still sniffling. “Okay. But I’m gonna need a drink.”
Cam forced a smile. “That, we can do.”
In the breakfast nook, I pulled a chair out from the table for Anne while Cam poured two fingers of whiskey over ice. He set the glass on the table in front of her, and Anne traded the box of tissues for her drink. She downed half of it, winced, then held the glass in both hands and stared into it.
“I haven’t told you guys the truth about all of this. About any of it, really.”
“Yeah, we gathered,” I said softly, trying to set her at ease.
“The truth is that I don’t know who Hadley’s father is. I don’t know what her full name is. I couldn’t even swear that Hadley is her real first name. All I know for sure is that she isn’t five—she’s seven. Fortunately, she’s kind of small for her age, so no one’s really questioned that. They just think she’s very bright, which is true. Hell, she even thinks she’s five.”
Damn. I blinked at Cam, relieved that he looked just as speechless and confused as I felt. But before I could formulate some kind of response, Anne went on.
“Hadley turned seven last month. And she’s not mine.”
Twenty-Three
“Whoa…” Cam stood and stomped toward the kitchen, then turned to face us again, stiff with anger. “You let me think she might be mine, when she isn’t even yours?”
“I’m sorry.” Anne set the glass down and turned in her chair to face him. “It never occurred to me that you’d think that. I honestly haven’t thought about…that night—the party—in years, and I hadn’t done the math in my head, because… Well, because the math isn’t real. She’s not really five.”
“So…who’s her mother?” I asked, while Cam ran cold water into a glass at the sink.
Anne studied my expression, as if she was testing it for sincerity. “You really haven’t figured it out?”
“No!” Even as I answered, I was silently grasping at straws, looking for clues I might have missed, fully aware that there were probably some things she couldn’t tell me. But I came up empty. “How could we have?”
Anne sighed and picked up her glass again, but just held it, as if she was testing her own willpower. And this time when she looked at me, her damp eyes were bottomless wells of pain mixed with relief. “Olivia, she’s Elle’s daughter. How can you look at her and not see Noelle?”
Stunned, I sat back in my chair, and on the edge of my vision, I saw Cam slowly lower his glass of water. I hadn’t seen it—we hadn’t seen it—because we weren’t looking for it. We hadn’t been looking for Noelle.
Cam refilled his glass, then sat down on Anne’s other side, across the small table from me. “Why do you have Noelle’s daughter? And how did she get a daughter? And where the hell is she?”
All valid, important questions, but the rapid-fire succession only added to the chaos. “I think we can deduce how she got a daughter,” I said, then returned my attention to Anne. “But as for the rest of it, we’re truly in the dark.”
“Okay.” Anne drained her glass, then slowly swirled the ice standing in the bottom. “A few days after that party—the party—a woman showed up on my porch with a baby.”
“Seriously?” Cam asked, and Anne nodded.
“Just like she’d stepped out of a movie. She had a baby in a car-seat carrier and a letter from Noelle, asking me—begging me—to take care of her. That was it. No time limit. No ‘I’ll be back for her soon.’ Just ‘Will you please take care of my baby,’ and ‘Will you please not tell anyone that she’s mine unless it’s necessary for her safety.’ That, and a list of her vital statistics. And, of course, I had to do it. Not that I would have just left Hadley on the porch, but you know, because of the binding, I didn’t have that choice.”
I frowned, trying to puzzle through an inconsistency in her story. “But how did she…” And then I understood what probably should have been clear earlier. “You didn’t burn the second oath. Noelle did.”
Anne nodded. “That’s the only thing I can figure, anyway. Otherwise, she would never have been able to ask me, even through a letter.”
“Why didn’t you come to me for help? I could have tracked her!” And maybe I could have prevented all of this…!
“Because I couldn’t!” Anne sat straighter, her animated gestures fueled by frustration. “You’d have asked about the baby, and I couldn’t tell you she was Elle’s! I did try to find her, though. I’ve hired Tracker after Tracker over the years, and no one’s even gotten a single blip on her signature. No sign that she’s even alive. And she’s not. She can’t be. She would have come back for her daugh20;Jf she were still alive.”
“Okay, wait,” I said, trying to sort through information swirling around my head. “Noelle gave you her baby?” It was part question, part repetition of the facts in an attempt to understand them. “She just…what? Sent the babysitter over with her only child? Why?”
“I don’t know. The sitter said she was their neighbor and she’d agreed to watch Hadley for a few days, while Elle went home to see her parents. Elle said she hadn’t told them about the baby yet, and she wasn’t sure how they’d react.”
“I thought you said Elle’s parents are dead,” Cam said, turning to me.
“They are,” Anne answered for me, picking up the glass again, staring into it as if she could see the past in the melting ice cubes. They’d died in a wreck our freshman year in college, leaving Elle and her older brother no choice but to sell their house and take out loans for school. “And we spent that whole New Year’s weekend with her, and she never told anyone she had a baby.” Anne shrugged. “She never told me, anyway. I’m assuming you didn’t know, either.”
“No clue.” I admitted. “How did the sitter know to bring the baby to you?”
“That’s where it gets weird…”
“I think we’re way past weird,” Cam said.
“Evidently Elle gave the sitter my address and told her to bring me the baby if she didn’t come to pick her up on time. And, of course, Elle never showed up. To my knowledge, she never showed up anywhere after the party.”
“What about the dad?” Cam poured a shot for himself before passing the whiskey to me. “Did the sitter know the father?”
Anne shook her head, while I debated having a drink. “That was the first thing I asked. The sitter said she’d never seen Elle with a man at all, and Elle never once mentioned the father. A couple of weeks later, the sitter called me and said Noelle was being evicted. So I went to the address she gave me and she watched the baby while I packed up Elle’s things. I went through everything, looking for some sign of where she’d gone, or who Hadley’s father is, but I found nothing. All her correspondence was from us—none of it recent—and all her old pictures were from high school, except for Hadley’s baby pictures. Most of those were on her camera or her laptop, and there isn’t a man in a single one of them. Just the baby, and a few shots of Elle with her.”
“She knew something was going to happen,” Cam said silently. And I decided I needed that drink after all. “Elle saw something and knew she wasn’t going to be there to raise the baby, so she arranged for you to take care of her.”
“Then she went back home to see everyone one last time….” I downed my shot, savored the smoothness of a whiskey I could never afford and poured another. “That’s why she told me about you and me when she did—she knew she wasn’t going to get another chance.”
Anne looked puzzled, but respected our privacy enough not to ask for details.
“So, she knew she was going to die, and she made arrangements for Hadley,” I said, eager to redirect the conversation. “But why would she want you to let everyone think the baby was yours?”
“I don’t know,” Anne said. “I don’t know anything, other than what I’ve already told you. All I know for sure is that she gave me Hadley and asked me to keep her safe, and I’ve raised her as my own, and I love her more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life—including Shen—and now she’s gone, and I’m not protecting her, and the only thing that hurts worse than my head right now is my heart.” Tears filled her eyes and threatened to run over as she pressed one hand to her chest so hard I was sure she was bruising her own ribs. “I’m so scared, and I don’t know how to get her back….”
“We’re going to get her back.” I rubbed Anne’s back absently, while my thoughts shot in a thousand different directions at once, then finally settled on one point. “Your head…” Her head hurt because she was no longer actively protecting Hadley, as Elle had asked her to. It would probably hurt worse and lead to systemic shutdown if she wasn’t already trying to get Hadley back. “Maybe this will help, at least a little.” I dug through my satchel for a bottle of Tylenol while Cam ran cold water into a fresh glass.
“What about the vital statistics?” he said, as Anne swallowed four pills at once. “You said she left you some information about the baby? What was the information?”
“Oh, um…” Anne rubbed her face again, thinking. “Her birthday. February eighth. She was almost eleven months old when I got her, but I had to gradually push her age back by another year to account for the pregnancy I never actually had, before I could get back in contact with anyone I’d known before. Elle also left me her blood type—she’s A positive. Her length and weight at birth. And potential allergies—Elle was allergic to penicillin and peaches, so she thought Hadley might be, too. Turned out to be a yea on the peaches, nay on the penicillin, thank goodness.”
“What about a birth certificate?” I asked, still hoping for a clue about the father’s identity.
“Nope.” Anne shook her head slowly, as if she was narrating a memory. “I had to pay for a fake one, just to get her enrolled in school.”
“Did Shen know she wasn’t yours?”
Anne shook her head again. “No one knew, except my parents, and I swore them to secrecy. I had to kind of back away from everyone I’d known for a while, to avoid questions I couldn’t answer, so for a long time, it was just me and Hadley.”
I couldn’t imagine how alone she must have felt.
Well, yes, I could. I knew all about being alone. But I couldn’t imagine being alone with a baby. Especially a baby that came with no warning and no explanation. And no instructions. Maybe that was why Elle hadn’t left her child to me.
Why she hadn’t left her with Kori was obvious.
“Okay…” Cam sank onto the chair opposite me, looking more hopeless and frustrated than I’d ever seen him. “So, just to sum up, we need to find and free a missing child, but we have no idea where she is, no blood sample and only her first name to work with. Is that accurate?”
Anne and I glanced at each other, and finally she nodded. “Based on what I know…yes.”
“Based on what you know…” Cam mulled that over for a second, then looked up again. “But what do you really know? What do any of us really know? I mean, is Hadley even really her name?”
“Yes. It has to be.” Anne’s confidence in her statement never wavered.
“Why? Because you’ve been calling her that all her life? Because Elle told you in a note? What if Elle was lying? She lied to us all, that whole weekend, just by never mentioning the fact that she had a kid.” Cam leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, and the bitter resignation in his eyes scared me. “Maybe she doesn’t. Or didn’t. We don’t know for sure that Hadley’s hers, do we? All we have is the written word of a dead woman.”
“Hadley is Noelle’s daughter,” Anne insisted, and I recognized the fiery determination sparking behind her calm facade. I recognized it, and I welcomed it. “She had pictures of Hadley dating back to the day she was born. Why would she spend so much time, energy and money on someone else’s kid?”
Cam shrugged. “You did.”
“Yeah, and I’m not done doing it. Because she was Elle’s daughter, and now she’s my daughter, and her name is Hadley.”
“You can’t be sure of that….” I said softly, when I couldn’t find a flaw in Cameron’s logic, harsh though it sounded. “Not one hundred percent.”
Anne turned on me, and I could practically feel the heat of her anger. “Yes, I can. I am absolutely sure of that because I know how Elle must have felt when sh
e sent her baby to me. She knew she was going to die, and her child was the most precious thing in the world to her, and I’ve been walking in those exact footprints for the past two days. Tower’s men will kill me to get to Hadley—they’ve already killed Shen—so I’ve been struggling with the same mental preparation for her future that Elle had to face. And if I know anything at all, it’s that no mother would prepare to give her daughter a new life—a life of lies meant to protect her—without leaving her with at least one truth. Hadley doesn’t know who her mother really was. She doesn’t know who her father is. She doesn’t know what Skill she’ll inherit, or if she’ll ever see her home again. The only truth she has is her real name—one quarter of it, anyway. The name her real mother gave her, and the only thing that can never be taken from her. And Elle would never lie about that.”
Cam and I stared at Anne, stunned by the power of her words and her absolute conviction. And finally Cam nodded. “Okay. We have one name to work with. I guess that’s better than no name.” But not much.
He didn’t say the last part, but I heard it anyway.
“Okay, here’s what I suggest.” I stood and started opening kitchen drawers in search of paper and a pen. “You two sit and think of every possible name Elle could have given her daughter. Ithat nooncentrate mostly on middle names, since we have no idea who the father is, and she probably has his surname.” A child’s surname was entirely up to the mother to give—it could be hers, the father’s or any other random name she chose, though the rest of the world would almost always know the child by his or her father’s last name.
“I don’t know…” Anne said, as I plucked a black ballpoint pen from a disturbingly neat—and sparsely populated—junk drawer. “She has no pictures of the father, and there wasn’t a single mention of him in any of her personal correspondence or official paperwork. I don’t think she wants anything to do with him. And if that’s the case, why give the baby his name?”