“I can’t believe this,” I said quietly.

“I’m sorry,” Jenny said. “I thought you had a right to know. I didn’t know if they’d ever tell you.”

I touched the sheet of printer paper. Lily Ann Knightly. Lily. “Who am I?” I asked.

Jenny pressed her cheek to my shoulder and her arm tightened around me. “You’re Grace,” she said. “My best friend, and don’t you ever forget it.”

My mind was miles away. “I always knew I didn’t fit in. My mother… It’s like she wishes I was someone else,” I said. “That dead baby. That’s who my mother was supposed to get as her daughter.” I stood and waved my hands through the air. “Oh, my God, Jenny. A baby died. I hate Noelle. How could anyone do something like this?”

“If she never took you, you wouldn’t be my friend, though, and I can’t stand that thought.”

It was true. I couldn’t imagine my life without Jenny in it. But that felt like the only thing that was good about my life right then.

“When are they going to tell my mother?” That would be it, I thought. That would be the moment my mother cut me out of her heart. Right now, she had to love me and put up with me. No wonder she’s nothing like me, my mother would think. How could she help but think that? How could she help but wonder about how different, how perfect, her real daughter would have been?

“I think Tuesday,” Jenny said. “Don’t tell her I told you, okay? My mother would kill me for snooping. I have to get these things back before she figures out I took them.”

“What’s the other paper?” I pointed to the two sheets of printer paper on her lap.

“It’s just nothing.” Jenny stuck both sheets back in the folder.

“Let me see,” I said. Jenny was a terrible liar.

She hesitated, then reached into the folder and handed me another paper printed from the Missing Children’s Bureau website.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.

I couldn’t speak. My mother? And a sister. “Where do they live?” I was finally able to ask. “Are they in Wilmington?”

“I don’t think so. She’s director of this Missing Children’s place and I don’t think that’s here.”

“She’s been looking for me,” I whispered. “All my life, she’s been looking for me.” I felt so much sympathy for her. Sympathy, and a longing so strong I felt it from the center of my heart to the ends of my fingers. “She probably thinks I’m dead.”

Jenny took the paper from my hand and put it back in the folder. “Look, I’ve got to get home,” she said. “I told my mother I was just going to the store for cough medicine. She’ll be calling me any second.”

“Leave the papers with me,” I said.

“I can’t. She’ll notice they’re gone.”

“Please, Jenny. I need them.”

“I can’t.” She started to put the folder back in the grocery bag, but I grabbed it from her and hugged it to my chest.

“Grace! I have to put them back!” she said.

“I’m keeping them. They’re mine. They’re about me.”

“Gracie. Please. She’ll kill me.” She grabbed for the folder but I turned around quickly, opened my dresser drawer and shut the file inside it.

“Grace!” She tried to get to the drawer but I held her away. “You can find the same stuff on that website,” she said. “On that Missing Children’s website.”

I held my hands out to my sides to keep her from getting to the drawer. She was right; I could find the information on the site, but I wanted those sheets of paper. Suddenly I felt like I couldn’t stand one more thing being taken away from me. “Let me keep them, Jenny,” I pleaded. I felt tears running down my cheeks. “Let them be mine.”

She stared at me a minute, then pulled me into a hug. “Make copies,” she said into my hair. “Then give them back to me tomorrow.” I wasn’t sure which one of us was crying harder.

I sat in my room for an hour after Jenny left, the two sheets of paper on my lap. I’d stared at the words on them for a long time before it got too dark to see them any longer, and it was like I didn’t have the energy to turn on the light. When my mother came home, she stopped in my room to tell me she’d picked up sandwiches for dinner. I turned on the light then because I wanted to see if she looked any different to me, but she didn’t. She wasn’t the one who had changed in the past couple of hours.

After my mother went downstairs again, I logged on to the internet. I found the website for the Missing Children’s Bureau and followed the URL to the page about Anna Knightly. I caught my breath. A picture! Omigod, she looked so amazing. She had this open, beautiful face. You could tell so much from a picture. She looked gentle and full of love. She had green eyes, which had to be where my flecks of green came from. I didn’t think she looked anything like me otherwise, though. My own mother—at least, the mother who raised me—looked more like me than Anna Knightly did. I tried to find myself in her face, holding my hand mirror in front of me so I could look back and forth from my reflection to her photograph. My real father, I thought. I must look more like him. I shivered, creeped out by the thought of having any other father than the one I’d grown up with. The one I would love forever, no matter what.

I read the one sentence over and over again. “Her infant daughter, Lily, disappeared.” How did they tell her that her baby had vanished? I pictured this pretty, soft-looking woman going into the hospital nursery to take her daughter home, and all the nurses scrambling to look for the baby, their panic rising as they realized she was gone. I was gone. I still couldn’t get it through my head that Lily was me. I could imagine how Anna Knightly felt when they told her. How she’d grieved for her. For me. I could have had a whole different life.

Missing children turned up dead. That’s the way it always was on the news, and after all this time that had to be what Anna Knightly expected. She only knew I disappeared. She didn’t know the rest of my story.

“I’m alive,” I said to the picture on my monitor. “I’m right here.”

Where did she live? Could I find a phone number for her somehow? Could I call her right now? Right this second? I wanted to tell her I was alive. She could die tomorrow and we never would have known each other.

There was a phone number for the Missing Children’s Bureau and I wrote it down. There was an address, too, in Alexandria, Virginia, one state away. My mother—my biological mother—was only one puny state away.

I couldn’t sleep. I kept picturing a map. Alexandria was in the northern part of Virginia, wasn’t it? Near Washington? Washington was only like five hours away. I needed to meet Anna. I needed to find out who I really was. I could call her at the Missing Children’s Bureau early in the morning, but it would be so much better to meet her in person. I sat up, totally wired. I had to meet her now, I thought, as soon as I possibly could. Life was short. Tomorrow Anna could get killed driving to work. It happened.

I grabbed my phone and speed-dialed Cleve’s number and when he picked up—he picked up!—I burst into tears.

“Don’t hang up. Don’t hang up!” I said. “I have to talk to you. It’s not about us. Don’t worry. I just have to talk to you or I’ll go crazy.”

“Grace, it’s nearly midnight.” He sounded wide-awake. I heard people talking in the background. A girl laughing. “We can talk tomorrow, okay?” he asked.

“I just found out I was stolen from another woman when I was a baby!”

He was quiet. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I explained everything: Jenny overhearing the conversation between her mother and Ian. Noelle’s letter to Anna Knightly. The stolen baby. The Missing Children’s Bureau.

“I don’t believe this,” he said. “Are you making this up?”

“No,” I said. “Talk to Jenny tomorrow if you don’t believe me. They’re going to tell my mother Tuesday. She already thinks I’m…” My voice broke, catching me off guard. “I’ve never really been the daughter she wanted. The other baby, the one who died, probably would have been just like her.”

“Hold on a sec,” Cleve said. I heard him moving around. A door opening, maybe. “I had to go out in the hall,” he said after a minute. “My roommate’s got company. Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but your mom loves you. Everyone has issues with their mother, Grace. I’d love to disown mine half the time. But she’s my mother and she loves me and yours does, too.”

“That’s the difference. Suzanne is your mother. My mother isn’t. I want to meet my real mother and tell her everything. I’m going there.”

“Where?”

“Virginia. I’m going to go meet her.”

“When? And how do you plan to get there?”

“I’ll drive. Tomorrow.”

He laughed. “Don’t be so twelve years old, Grace.”

His words stung. “You don’t know how this feels,” I said.

“Look, tomorrow you tell your mother what Jenny told you, and—”

“I’ll get Jenny in trouble. She’s not supposed to know any of this.”

“Jenny’ll get over it. You tell your mom. If what you’re saying is true—and I doubt it—you and your mom need a lawyer. Ian’s a lawyer, right? There’s all kinds of legal stuff that’ll need to be sorted out.”

“Lawyers screw everything up,” I said. My father had been a great lawyer, but he always slowed things down when it came to his clients’ cases. I bet Ian was the same way. Daddy wanted everybody to take their time. Not rush into things. If he was alive, I wondered what he would do with this mess. “Oh, Cleve,” I said, “my dad’s not really my dad!”