“Your baby died.” Her cheek was on my shoulder, her breath against my throat.

At some point, I knew that phantom baby would work her way into my heart, but she wasn’t there yet. “I’m not thinking about that baby,” I said. “I’m thinking about you.”

“Can I be with you when you talk to Anna? Please?”

It had been easy for Ian to tell me to get Grace and go.

Easy for me to think of doing exactly that before I’d set foot in that hospital room, where “Anna Knightly” turned from a mere name to a woman. A mother.

I hugged Grace closer to me. I knew she was afraid that Anna would somehow convince me to turn her over without a fight. Why was it that on this day I understood my daughter so well? Had I known her all along?

“Yes,” I said. “This is all about you and you can be with us.”



56

Anna


The woman, Tara, wanted Grace to be with us as we sat in the little room. I thought it would be better to leave her out of the discussion. She could stay with Haley while Tara and I talked, but Tara and Grace were a unit. Two against one. That’s good, I told myself. That’s the way it should be. If Grace turned out to be my Lily, I wanted her to have had the sort of life where she was loved and protected. Yet Grace seemed so fragile that I wasn’t sure she should be privy to our conversation. Still, it wasn’t my call.

Grace looked more like Tara than she did like me, that was for sure, but frankly, she didn’t look much like either of us. She and Tara sat side by side on the love seat, holding hands. Both of them probably had brown hair beneath the blond highlights and both of them had brown eyes, yet their features were dissimilar. I couldn’t help but study them, comparing one nose to the other. The shape of their lips. The curve of their eyebrows.

I couldn’t get past my lack of feeling for Grace except as a possible bone marrow donor for Haley, and that upset me. I never expected to feel so flat at the prospect of seeing my lost daughter in front of me.

“I don’t understand how all this happened,” Tara said. “Were you living in Wilmington?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same question for the past couple of hours,” I said. “And no, I was living here, but I was a pharmaceutical rep and I often traveled to Wilmington.” I remembered back. I needed to figure this out for myself. “I was about thirty-five weeks pregnant with Lily on my last trip down there. Bryan, my husband, was stationed overseas at the time. While I was in Wilmington, I went into premature labor and delivered Lily down there. She was already six pounds three ounces and healthy. I was having trouble with my blood pressure, though, and a few hours after Lily was born, I had a stroke and slipped into a coma.”

“Oh, my God,” Tara said.

“They transported me to Duke,” I said. “Bryan was still in Somalia, trying to get permission to come home, but of course I was out of it and had no idea what was happening. When Bryan got home, he stayed in a hotel near Duke. I guess it was a terrible time for him.” It was something I rarely thought about, how incredibly difficult that period must have been for Bryan. “Our home was up here in Alexandria. Our newborn baby was in Wilmington. And I was in a coma in Durham. He called the hospital in Wilmington to ask about Lily, and they told him she wasn’t there. That she must have been transferred with me. Bryan tried to reach the EMTs who transferred me, but no one had a record of a baby being moved with me. She—” I looked at Grace “—she had just vanished along with any record of her birth. Bryan didn’t know the name of the doctor who delivered her. It was all a big mess. I was in a coma a little more than two weeks. I’d actually had very little damage from the stroke, thank God. My left side was weak. My vision and speech were a little off. My left hand is still not all that strong.” I flexed my fingers. “My memory was worthless. I couldn’t remember any doctors’ names, either. The only thing I remembered was that I’d had a beautiful baby and I wanted her back.”

“I’m sorry,” Tara said, but I saw her tighten her hand around Grace’s as if she had no intention of ever letting her go.

“When I was well enough to travel,” I continued, “we went to Wilmington. Lily would have been about seven weeks old by then. We worried that someone thought Lily had been abandoned, which in a way she had been, and that they’d moved her to foster care, so we searched through the foster system.”

“How terrible for you,” Tara said, but she was still clutching Grace’s hand hard.

“I saw the letter your midwife wrote to me,” I said. “I… It’s hard to take it all in. Did you have any idea?”

“None,” Tara said. “Noelle died recently….” She looked at Grace. “Did you tell her?”

Grace nodded.

“She committed suicide and my friend and I found the letter and we began searching for the ‘Anna’ Noelle was writing to. We finally figured out it was you, but we didn’t know whose baby she…whose baby died. We never in a million years thought it was mine.”

“Didn’t you see your baby…I mean, wouldn’t you know if your baby suddenly looked different?” I asked.

“It was the middle of the night when she was born and my labor had been very difficult. When Noelle brought her to me in the morning, I guess she’d already…made the substitution, because that baby was definitely Grace.”

“I don’t think much of your midwife,” I said.

“She did a terrible thing,” Tara said. “But it’s hard for me to let it define who she was.”

“Tell her about the babies program,” Grace said softly.

“Would you like to tell her?” Tara asked. “You’re more involved with it than I am.”

“She started an organization to help babies…preemies and poor babies and sick babies,” Grace said. “She won the Governor’s Award for it, but she wouldn’t accept it.”

I couldn’t look at her as she spoke. I was so afraid of attaching to her. Instead, I looked at Tara. “Maybe this is why,” I said, sweeping my hand through the air to take in the three of us and our predicament. “Maybe she felt she didn’t deserve any awards.”

“Could be,” Tara agreed. She put her arm around Grace. “I think we need a DNA test,” she said. “And I think we’d both better lawyer up. I don’t mean that in an adversarial way, but we—”

“I agree completely,” I said. “We all need to know what we’re dealing with. But I did explain to Grace earlier about Haley’s need for a bone marrow donor. She’s extremely ill. She’s—” I shrugged, giving into the word “—she’s terminally ill. And Grace agreed…”

“Grace didn’t know what she was agreeing to, Anna,” Tara said. “I’m sorry, but I have to put the brakes on right now, okay? Let’s take things a little more slowly. I’ll have my lawyer contact yours and see what timeline they recommend for the DNA test and then go from there.”

I felt like jumping from my seat and barring the door. “In a normal world, that would make sense,” I said. No tears. Please no tears. Tara was a cool customer and one thing I’d learned in my line of business was the need to stay calm. Still, I couldn’t keep the tremor out of my voice. “Please understand, Tara. I don’t know if Grace is Lily…” I looked at Grace. “I’m sorry to speak about you in the third person,” I said. “I just don’t know, but what if she is? And what if she’s a match for Haley? And what if we find that out too late? We haven’t been able to find a donor and a sibling has a one in four chance of being a good match.”

Tara shook her head. “You’re asking a lot of her,” she said. “That decision will just have to wait.”

“I want to do it,” Grace said. She looked at her mother. “I have to.”

“No, you don’t, honey. You don’t have to do anything.”

“I want to,” she repeated.

Please let her, I thought.

I saw Tara weaken. A lawyer would say to wait, I was sure of it, but this was different. This was two mothers. Two daughters.

“All right.” Tara gave in. “If you’re sure.”



57

Emerson


Jenny’s ice cream sundae had melted into a mocha-colored soup in her bowl and she pushed the soft liquid around with her spoon. My salad was practically untouched. We sat by the window in the cafeteria, surrounded by the chatter of doctors and nurses and visitors, but Jenny and I were in our own little bubble.

Maybe we should have gone with Tara to the girl’s room. I told myself that giving them privacy had been for the best. It was going to be confusing enough as it was; adding two more people to the mix could only make it messier. But I’d been glad Tara hadn’t wanted us with her. I didn’t think I could stand to watch her go through it all. I felt so guilty. Guilty for not telling her the moment I suspected that Grace was Anna Knightly’s child. Guilty that it was my daughter who hurt Grace with the truth. And I was tormented by the thought of how Tara felt at that moment.

I could imagine the conversation between Tara and Anna Knightly. Two mothers fighting over their daughter. Of course, Grace would always be Tara’s. Anything else was unthinkable. Yet Anna’s baby had been stolen from her. How could she not demand at least a part of that child’s life back?

Jenny pushed her bowl of ice cream soup away from her. “I am so sorry, Mom,” she said once again. I’d lost track of how many times she’d apologized.

“Look,” I said, moving my salad aside, “you screwed up by not telling me you overheard. I screwed up by not talking to Tara right away. But none of that would change the fact that Noelle did what she did and now everyone has to deal with the consequences. That’s what you and I need to focus on. Helping Tara and Grace handle what’s coming.”

“I don’t want her to move away and be part of some other family and live up here and—”