"You've met my adoptive mother."

Her meaning was slowly sinking in. He rocked back in his chair. "Holy s.h.i.t," he said.

"No one knows," she said. "Only my adoptive mother and me. And now you."

She explained everything. The file she'd found. How she'd felt when she saw Emerson's name on the list of students at Galloway. How her mother made her swear she would never tell any of this to a soul.

"Was it legal?" Sam asked. "Your adoption?"

"Yes, although there might have been some...I think my parents got some preferential treatment because my mother was involved in my birth. I don't know. At this point, it really doesn't matter."

"So you... s.h.i.t." His eyes widened. "You lost your biological mother this morning and you can't tell anyone."

She felt her lower lip tremble. "Except you."

"Your father," he asked. "Do you know who...?"

She looked down at her knees where his tan fingers still rested against her fair skin and shook her head. "Some boy she met at a party," she said. "I don't even have a name for him." She pounded her own knee with her fist. "That was my grandfather at the door earlier!" she said. "My grandfather. And I just stood there staring at him."

"I'm so sorry, Noelle," Sam said.

"I don't exist for that family. I couldn't say anything."

"Maybe..." Sam looked through the screens toward the beach. "You know how sometimes women who relinquish their kids for adoption later agree to have the records unsealed if both parties want to-"

"She didn't," Noelle said. "I've checked. I'm just a giant hideous reminder of a mistake she made. That's all right. I have a great mother, so I lucked out. But I thought I'd..." Her voice broke and she struggled to go on. "I thought I'd get to meet my birth mother someday," she said. "I thought there was time."

Sam stood and held out his hand. "Come here," he said, and when she stood, he closed his arms around, holding her while she cried. There were men who would be afraid of what she'd told him, she thought. Men who'd fear that level of intimacy or who'd crumble under the weight of such a monumental secret. But Sam felt like a pillar beneath her arms. Someone she could lean on. Someone she could talk to about anything. Her biggest wishes. Her worst secrets. Someone she'd be able to talk to. Always.

They spent the next three days together in the cottage. Tara would return on the evening of the third day, though Emerson would stay with her relatives in California another week. Noelle would always treasure those three days with Sam-days of a friendship that deepened by the hour. The only difficult thing was that she knew there was only one Sam and he was not hers. She'd always thought she could live without a man, easily. This man, though, she was not so sure she could live without.

By the morning of the third day, she'd found her smile again. She and Sam had cooked together, gone out to eat one night, rubbed sunscreen on each other's backs, swam in the sea and talked and talked and talked. The words felt like an aphrodisiac to Noelle, but she fought back the desire. He was not hers. Don't ever hurt another woman the way Doreen hurt me, her mother had told her. Never, she thought, lying in her bed at night, wishing Sam could be beside her. Never.

"I want you to know something," he said to her the night before Tara returned. They'd built a small illegal fire on the beach and were toasting marshmallows on bamboo skewers they'd found in the cottage.

"What's that?" Noelle nibbled the gooey white candy from the skewer.

"That I love you." Sam had his eyes on his skewer instead of on her. "But Tara is it for me. I think you know that." He glanced at her.

She felt dizzy from the heat of the night as well as from his admission.

"I love you, too," she said.

He nodded. That was no surprise to him. "You understand how it is with Tara and me, don't you? Our history. And how we've always just known we'd be together."

She nodded. "I love Tara, too," she said honestly. "If I can't have you, I'd want her to have you."

"The sort of life I want, I can have with her." He seemed lost in his own thoughts. "A normal, settled-down kind of life."

She felt the slightest sliver of pain. "What am I?" She smiled. "A freak?"

He laughed. "You're different, Noelle. Wonderfully different. You're never going to want the big house and the white picket fence and the two kids and a dog."

She wondered if that was really what he wanted. There was a very large part of Sam Vincent that was not a white-picket-fence sort of guy. But she didn't want to hurt him or Tara, and debating the merits of a settled-down life with him could only lead down that path.

"Just be my forever friend, okay?" she asked.

He held his skewer in front of her, offering her the perfect golden marshmallow. "You've got it," he said.

She slipped the marshmallow from the skewer with her fingertips and popped it into her mouth, feeling proud of herself for not asking more of Sam, proud of herself for not hurting Tara, not daring to think that forever was a long, long time.

24.

Tara Wilmington, North Carolina

2010.

Noelle's house looked sad to me as I pulled into the drive way. The painters had sc.r.a.ped much of the blue from the front of the cottage and the siding was mottled and ugly. The sun had just risen, glowing pink in the windows. It was Sat.u.r.day and I didn't know if the painters were working today. I hoped not. I was here to work on the garden and I wanted the time to think.

Emerson had found Anna. She was the head of a missing children's organization, which made her into a real human being to me, a woman who'd lived through an unimaginable horror and come out of it strong and determined. I'd felt sick to my stomach when Emerson called to tell me what she'd learned. With each new piece of information, this woman's story was going to feel more real and our need to do something about it more inescapable. Emerson was coming over to my house that afternoon and we'd figure out what to do next. I knew she regretted ever opening that box of letters.

I got out of my van and surveyed Noelle's front yard. It was a mess, overgrown and weedy. Noelle'd had no interest in yard work with the exception of the garden. Although I was in charge of that garden until the house was rented, I'd only had time to water it and pull a few weeds. Now, nearly three weeks after Noelle's death, it needed some major attention. I pictured people driving by the decrepit house and yard, whispering to one another, Something terrible must have happened here. They wouldn't know the half of it.

Emerson had left Noelle's gardening tools in a large bucket on the back steps, but I'd brought my own. I sat on the steps, slipping on my kneepads and gloves as I looked out over the yard. It was small, the gra.s.s tired, the one tree stunted and scraggly. Someone had cut the gra.s.s recently; I could see the lines left by the mower. The yards on either side of Noelle's bled into hers. It was a sorry sight. Except for the garden. The rising sun seemed to settle on that corner of the yard, lighting it up like a jewel.

Behind me, Noelle's house felt so haunted that I shivered and got to my feet, walking away from it and toward the garden. If you have a friend, I pondered, a good friend, a woman you love, and you learn she's done something abominable, do you stop loving her? In spite of everything we were learning about Noelle, I refused to forget what she'd meant to us. To me. I was haunted by the note she'd left behind in which her one request was to take care of her garden. I would do that for the Noelle I knew and loved. The Noelle who lied and deceived had not been well, and I blamed all of us for not recognizing that fact and taking better care of her.

The garden was laid out in a triangle, the sides about seven feet long, and it was bursting with color in spite of the fact that we were now into October. Containers of all shapes and sizes were filled with chrysanthemums that she must have planted right before she died. I got to work, cutting back the coneflowers and black-eyed Susans and Shasta daisies. I weeded around the impatiens. I'd brought a flat of pansies with me and I carried it from the van and planted them around the birdbath. I felt as though I wasn't alone-the little bronze girl on her tiptoes was so real that I started talking to her.

"Look at these herbs," I said to her as I weeded around the parsley. Noelle had tricolor sage and pineapple sage and rosemary. She had gorgeous Thai basil. I cut some of every herb to give to Emerson that afternoon.

I was deadheading the mums when I remembered a conversation I'd had with Sam not long before he died.

"What's with Noelle's garden?" he'd asked me in bed one night.

"What do you mean?" The question seemed so out of the blue.

"She was telling me about it." Sam rarely had a reason to go to Noelle's house. He'd probably never even seen her garden.

"Well, it's tiny but beautiful," I said. "She loves it and she has a real green thumb, though you'd never know it from the front yard."

"She said she has a special birdbath."

I described the birdbath to him and told him about the reporters who'd wanted to write about it and how she wouldn't let them. It hadn't struck me as strange that Sam asked me about the garden at the time. I figured Noelle had collared him at a party and talked his ear off. Now, though, I wondered if that conversation had taken place over lunch in Wrightsville Beach. Something about them getting together like that still upset me. Not that I thought they were having an affair-I couldn't picture that at all-but I was bothered that neither of them had ever mentioned it to me. Ian was probably right that it had to do with Noelle's will, in which case I suppose it made sense that Sam never mentioned it. Either way, I would never be able to know the answer. Maybe that's what bothered me the most.

A few hours later, I was in my kitchen with the coffee brewing as I waited for Emerson. I'd made a fruit salad the night before, some of which I'd tried to push on Grace before driving her to the Animal House that morning, but she'd wanted a Pop-Tart and that was it.

Emerson was bringing over some of her zucchini and Gruyere cheese quiche and homemade coffee cake. How she could cook with everything that was going on was beyond me, but baking and eating had always been the way she coped with stress. I coped by straightening up, which was why I'd cleaned the windows in the kitchen before I made the mimosas. Now I opened the cabinet above the coffeemaker to get out my blue-and-white floral cups. Tucked behind them, sticking up like sore thumb, was the ugly old purple-striped travel mug Sam had used every day. It stopped my heart every time I saw it and I wasn't sure why I hadn't gotten rid of it when I'd donated his clothes and cleaned out his desk. I took out two of the blue-and-white cups and set them on the counter. Then I carefully reached behind the rest of the cups for the travel mug. I carried it to the mudroom and tossed it in the box I'd take to Goodwill sometime this week. The box was now full, ready to go. For some reason, getting rid of the mug seemed even more final than taking Sam's name off the voice mail and I felt sad as I folded the cardboard flaps down tight. Back in the kitchen, I pictured him with that mug heading out the door each morning-except that last morning. If the doorbell hadn't rung at that moment, I might have pulled the mug out of the box again.

Emerson and I carried platefuls of quiche and cups of coffee into my living room and sat on the sofa. On the coffee table, Emerson had stacked Noelle's record books along with a copy of the newspaper article she'd found about Anna Knightly. I'd read it already-several times-but I read it again now. The few lines made me shudder.

"Well, I think it's clear this is our woman," I said. "Our Anna." I didn't know why I'd started thinking of her as "our Anna." It was as though she'd become our responsibility.

"Now we have to figure out who has her baby," Emerson said.

"We'll have to involve the authorities if we get that far," I said.

Emerson sighed. "I know. I just... This is such a mess. I haven't been able to find anything to pinpoint exactly when her baby was taken. The article makes it sound like it was around 2000, but Noelle says 'years ago' in the letter she wrote, which makes it sound like more time had pa.s.sed."

"Although Noelle wrote that letter in 2003," I pointed out.

"True," Emerson said. "Still 'years ago' sounds like a long time."

"Which is the last record book?" I asked, and Emerson handed the top volume to me.

"We know the 'last baby' theory doesn't hold water, since it was a boy," she said, "but I have to say the last six months or so of her records are not as...I don't know, as complete and orderly as they used to be."

I looked at the last record. "Nineteen ninety-eight." I shook my head. "Still hard to believe that's when she stopped practicing and we never knew it."

"And if you look, you'll see she really slowed down before then. There are weeks between each delivery toward the end. The only other possibility is if there were records she kept someplace else. I went through every sheet of paper in her house, though. Ted and I have emptied the whole place out now. I didn't find anything else."

"Maybe she destroyed some records before she died," I suggested as I flipped through the pages. "She never would have wanted us to know about this." I came to a page that was completely obliterated by a black marker. "This might be it, don't you think?" I asked. "Why else would she black it out?"

"That's my guess, too," Emerson said. "And look." She reached for the book and I stood to hand it to her. Emerson flattened it open on the coffee table, spreading the pages apart. Leaning over, I could see that a page had been torn out.

"Is that right next to the blacked-out page?" I asked.

"Uh-huh," Emerson said.

"That must be it." I ran my finger down the torn sheet. "Have you tried to read what's under the black?"

"It's impossible to make out," Emerson said.

"What year is it?" I asked.

"The babies born before and after this record are both in '97," Emerson said.

"Why didn't she just tear that page out, too?"

"I think because there are notes about another case on the back of it."

"Maybe that boy baby wasn't actually her last delivery," I said. "Maybe she tore out the pages on the last one, too."

"She didn't," Emerson said. "No torn pages after that baby was born."

"Can I tear this page out?" I pointed to the page that had been blacked out by the marker. "We could hold it up to the light and maybe be able to read the writing behind the marker."

"Okay."

"Let me get a knife." I hopped to my feet. In the kitchen, I pulled the paring knife from the knife block and carried it back to the living room. Emerson took it from me. She ran the blade carefully along the inner edge of the page, then tore the sheet of paper cleanly from the book as though she did that sort of surgery every day.

"Here." I reached for the page since I was already on my feet. I carried it to the window and pressed it against the gla.s.s. It was hard to see the letters behind the black marker and they bled into the writing on the back of the page. "I think it's an R-a-b-a-e-e-a...oh, those first two a's are e's. Rebecca?"

Emerson stood behind me now, so close I could feel her breath on my neck. "Can you see the last name?" she asked.

My eyes were already tearing from trying to make out the letters. "Is the first letter a B?" I stepped aside to let Emerson take my place at the window.

"Baker?" she said. "Rebecca Baker."

"Good job!" I said. "Of course, now we have to figure out what we do with the name."

"I can't make out the address at all." Emerson was still scrutinizing the sheet of paper against the windowpane.

"We can check online for her." I was looking at the record book again. "I still think Noelle would have stopped after it happened," I said. "Don't you, Em? I mean, there are a bunch of babies born after this one. After Rebecca's. Have you read the entry for the last girl born."

"Yes," Emerson said. "The last baby was a boy, but the baby before him was a girl. And the records look fine, just a little...sloppy."

I read the name of Noelle's second to last patient. "Denise Abernathy. That's the girl's mother," I said. "I think we should check her out in addition to Rebecca."

Emerson sat down on the sofa again, the blacked-out sheet of paper in her hand. She tapped her fingers to her lips. "How exactly are we going to do this?" she asked. "Try to meet these women and see if their daughters look like them or what?"

I gnawed my lip. What would we do with these names? "Well," I said, "I guess we need to make up a reason to talk to them. I know it's...creepy, but how else can we do it?"

She nodded. "I'll try to find the Denise woman and you try to find Rebecca?" She sounded very unsure of herself, but in spite of the somber nature of what we were doing, I felt my usual thrill at taking on a new project. But then I remembered Grace's words. You just stay busy so you don't have to think about anything, she'd said. So you can forget about how messed up your life has gotten.

Well, I thought, what's so wrong with that?

25.