Hot!’s kitchen was far cleaner than the one I had at home. That was because the health department never showed up at my house, but they could sashay into the café at any moment. We had a ninety-nine rating and I was aiming for a hundred, which was why I was making Jenny clean the ice machine and scour every inch of the countertop before I’d let her go for the evening.

“I’m going to the library straight from here, Jenny,” I said, checking the refrigerator to make sure we had enough half-and-half for the morning, “so there’s a container of leftover butternut squash chili in here for dinner tonight. Will you take it home and heat it up for you and Dad?”

Jenny looked up from the counter. “You’re not coming home for dinner?” She acted like I’d said I planned to fly to the moon, but I couldn’t blame her. Except for the occasional girls’ night out with Tara, I was always home for dinner. Tonight, though, I had other plans. Unfortunately, I needed to lie about them.

“I need to do some research on heirloom recipes I want to add to the lunch menu,” I said. “I can’t get to them on Google, but the library has access.” My vagueness paid off. Jenny’s eyes glazed over at the word research. It had worked with Ted, too, when I gave him the same story. I’d lost Ted with heirloom. I had the feeling this wouldn’t be the last lie I told my family for a while. Not until I had things figured out. “So is that okay with you?” I took off my apron and hung it from the hook near the rear door. “You’ll take care of dinner?”

“I guess.” She pumped the spray bottle in an arc across the counter and began rubbing. “But I wanted to talk to you about my job. I’d like to work fewer hours.”

I laughed. “Wouldn’t we all,” I said.

She didn’t look at me and I wondered if she expected me to give her grief about it. I honestly didn’t need her that much right now. My manager, Sandra, and my other waitress and one cook could take care of things most of the time. Jenny needed the money, though, and she was a big help on the days she worked.

“I’m serious.” She moved the toaster to clean behind it. I tried to remember the last time I’d moved our toaster at home. “I’m doing more of the babies stuff because of Noelle being—” she shrugged “—you know.”

“And you want more time with Devon.”

Jenny smiled down at the counter, red-cheeked and busted. “I don’t have much free time right now,” she said.

She was smitten by this guy. I was so caught up in my own life, I’d barely noticed what was going on in hers.

“Less hours means less money in your pocket,” I said, putting away the bowls that had been air-drying in the dish rack.

“I know.”

“You work out a new schedule with Sandra and we’ll see how it looks,” I said. Jenny was a good kid. She was so much like me. Easygoing, with plenty of friends. Maybe not the most ambitious person in the world, but frankly, I thought it was more important to be liked than to be successful. I knew you could find experts who would argue with that, but I didn’t care. I wanted to be liked. So sue me. Jenny seemed to be well-liked by every person—child or adult—who knew her. I’d rather raise a child like that than one who’d stab another person in the back to get ahead.

The few boys she’d dated all seemed like nice kids, too.

She hadn’t been serious with any of them—at least, not as far as I knew—and that had been fine. Maybe Devon was different. I liked when they went out as a foursome with Grace and Cleve over the summer. Safety in numbers, though maybe I was kidding myself about that.

“How’s Grace holding up?” I asked as I closed the cabinet door.

“You mean about Cleve?”

“It’s got to be hard for her since you’re still with Devon.”

“She’s…” Jenny shrugged. “She’s bummed. And Cleve is being a cretin.”

“Well, I can understand his feelings.” I took the chili out of the refrigerator, afraid she might forget it. “He probably wants to experience college and being away from home without being tied down.”

“It’s not that,” Jenny said. “I get that. It’s how he’s acting now. He constantly texts her and emails her and that keeps her hopes up that he’ll get back together with her.”

“Oh,” I said. Not good.

“I mean, she does it first,” Jenny said. “Texts him or whatever. But he always gets back to her and then she thinks he still cares.”

“I’m sure he does still care.”

“Not the way she wants him to.” She put the spray bottle in the cabinet beneath the sink and tossed the paper towels in the trash. “I think he’s being mean,” she said.

“It’s a double whammy for her.” I slipped the chili into a plastic grocery bag. “First her dad and then Cleve.” Poor Grace. She’d been so close to Sam. I’d envied that. Ted and Jenny didn’t connect the way Sam and Grace had. “I feel bad for her,” I said.

“Me, too.” Jenny washed her hands at the sink, then leaned back against the counter as she dried them with a paper towel. “I can’t imagine Daddy dying, Mom,” she said. “It’s hard enough having Noelle die and Great-Grandpa at hospice.”

“I know, baby.” One of the hospice nurses had called me that morning to tell me my grandfather wanted to see me alone the next time, without Jenny or Ted. I had no idea why, but I’d honor his wish, of course. I’d do anything for him.

I stepped closer to Jenny, brushed aside the hair that nearly covered her left eye and planted a kiss on her temple. “Love you,” I said.

“You, too.” She shook her head to let the curtain of hair fall across her forehead again. Then she looked at the bag on the counter. “Ready to lock up?”

“Uh-huh.” I put my arm around her as we headed for the back door. I’d miss spending so much time with her if she cut back her hours in the café. “So how serious is it getting with Devon?” I asked.

“Not serious,” she said.

I felt the invisible wall go up between us and knew our mother/daughter bonding moment had passed. There’d be no getting it back this evening. That was all right. I’d remember these few minutes with Jenny as I tried to track down Anna, the woman who’d never had the chance to know her daughter because of what Noelle had done.

I sat down at one of the computers in the library, pulled up the NC Live website and typed in the password they’d given me at the desk. At home, I’d checked Google for Anna and baby and Wilmington and hospital and received plenty of useless hits. I was hoping NC Live would give me something more to go on.

According to Noelle’s record books, the last baby she delivered had been a boy, so our guess that she’d given up practicing after the “accident” was wrong. Unless, of course, she’d written nothing at all about that botched delivery in her records. I wanted to find the newspaper article Noelle had mentioned in the letter she’d started to write on July 8, 2003. Maybe an impossible task, but I needed to try.

It took me a while and some help from one of the librarians, but I finally found the search page for the Wilmington Star. Noelle’s letter didn’t say exactly when she saw the article mentioning Anna. NC Live only had issues of the Star back to April 2003, so I hoped the article was later than that. Maybe it actually appeared on the eighth and that was what prompted Noelle to write to her.

Optimistically, I decided to search June and July 2003 for any Wilmington Star articles containing the name Anna. How many could there be? Fifty-seven, as it turned out. I was swamped by Annas. I began sifting through the articles—obituaries, track team results, a crooked sheriff, a couple of births. I narrowed the results down to women who might have been of childbearing age during the years Noelle was a midwife. There was an Anna who won a Yard of the Month award, a twenty-seven-year-old Special Olympics athlete and a woman who stole beer from an IGA store. I jotted down the surname of the Yard of the Month winner—Fischelle—who seemed the only real possibility. She lived in midtown. I pictured her putting all her energy into her yard to try to fill the empty place her missing child had left behind.

I searched online for her. There was only one Anna Fischelle, and she did indeed live in Wilmington, but as close as I could figure from the White Pages website, she was about sixty-eight years old.

I tried another search of the Wilmington paper using the words hospital and baby and missing, but none of the results seemed promising. I sat back and frowned at the computer.

Time to get serious. Noelle had been a news junkie. At one time, she’d even had the New York Times delivered to her door in Wilmington each morning, but that had been long ago, before she started reading it online. I knew she’d read the Washington Post online, too, because she was always complaining about how conservative it had become. She read it, anyway. She loved any excuse to rail against pundits who annoyed her.

I tried the Post first, searching for an Anna between June 1 and July 8, 2003, and quickly had ten pages of two hundred and two results. I stared up at the library ceiling. This was a losing battle. It seemed silly to look at the Post and would be sillier still to look at the New York Times. The baby was taken from a Wilmington hospital. The article had almost certainly been in the Wilmington paper. I was about to switch back to the Star when my eye fell on a headline halfway down the first page of results: Police Defend Actions in Case of Missing Three-year-old Girl. I stared at the headline, caught by the word missing. But that couldn’t be the right article. The child Noelle had taken had been an infant. Maybe it was because I felt lost in a sea of search results and didn’t know what else to do that I clicked on the headline and began scanning the article for the name Anna.