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.”