“Okay, wait,” I said, trying to sort through information swirling around my head. “Noelle gave you her baby?” It was part question, part repetition of the facts in an attempt to understand them. “She just…what? Sent the babysitter over with her only child? Why?”

“I don’t know. The sitter said she was their neighbor and she’d agreed to watch Hadley for a few days, while Elle went home to see her parents. Elle said she hadn’t told them about the baby yet, and she wasn’t sure how they’d react.”

“I thought you said Elle’s parents are dead,” Cam said, turning to me.

“They are,” Anne answered for me, picking up the glass again, staring into it as if she could see the past in the melting ice cubes. They’d died in a wreck our freshman year in college, leaving Elle and her older brother no choice but to sell their house and take out loans for school. “And we spent that whole New Year’s weekend with her, and she never told anyone she had a baby.” Anne shrugged. “She never told me, anyway. I’m assuming you didn’t know, either.”

“No clue.” I admitted. “How did the sitter know to bring the baby to you?”

“That’s where it gets weird…”

“I think we’re way past weird,” Cam said.

“Evidently Elle gave the sitter my address and told her to bring me the baby if she didn’t come to pick her up on time. And, of course, Elle never showed up. To my knowledge, she never showed up anywhere after the party.”

“What about the dad?” Cam poured a shot for himself before passing the whiskey to me. “Did the sitter know the father?”

Anne shook her head, while I debated having a drink. “That was the first thing I asked. The sitter said she’d never seen Elle with a man at all, and Elle never once mentioned the father. A couple of weeks later, the sitter called me and said Noelle was being evicted. So I went to the address she gave me and she watched the baby while I packed up Elle’s things. I went through everything, looking for some sign of where she’d gone, or who Hadley’s father is, but I found nothing. All her correspondence was from us—none of it recent—and all her old pictures were from high school, except for Hadley’s baby pictures. Most of those were on her camera or her laptop, and there isn’t a man in a single one of them. Just the baby, and a few shots of Elle with her.”

“She knew something was going to happen,” Cam said silently. And I decided I needed that drink after all. “Elle saw something and knew she wasn’t going to be there to raise the baby, so she arranged for you to take care of her.”

“Then she went back home to see everyone one last time….” I downed my shot, savored the smoothness of a whiskey I could never afford and poured another. “That’s why she told me about you and me when she did—she knew she wasn’t going to get another chance.”

Anne looked puzzled, but respected our privacy enough not to ask for details.

“So, she knew she was going to die, and she made arrangements for Hadley,” I said, eager to redirect the conversation. “But why would she want you to let everyone think the baby was yours?”

“I don’t know,” Anne said. “I don’t know anything, other than what I’ve already told you. All I know for sure is that she gave me Hadley and asked me to keep her safe, and I’ve raised her as my own, and I love her more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life—including Shen—and now she’s gone, and I’m not protecting her, and the only thing that hurts worse than my head right now is my heart.” Tears filled her eyes and threatened to run over as she pressed one hand to her chest so hard I was sure she was bruising her own ribs. “I’m so scared, and I don’t know how to get her back….”

“We’re going to get her back.” I rubbed Anne’s back absently, while my thoughts shot in a thousand different directions at once, then finally settled on one point. “Your head…” Her head hurt because she was no longer actively protecting Hadley, as Elle had asked her to. It would probably hurt worse and lead to systemic shutdown if she wasn’t already trying to get Hadley back. “Maybe this will help, at least a little.” I dug through my satchel for a bottle of Tylenol while Cam ran cold water into a fresh glass.

“What about the vital statistics?” he said, as Anne swallowed four pills at once. “You said she left you some information about the baby? What was the information?”

“Oh, um…” Anne rubbed her face again, thinking. “Her birthday. February eighth. She was almost eleven months old when I got her, but I had to gradually push her age back by another year to account for the pregnancy I never actually had, before I could get back in contact with anyone I’d known before. Elle also left me her blood type—she’s A positive. Her length and weight at birth. And potential allergies—Elle was allergic to penicillin and peaches, so she thought Hadley might be, too. Turned out to be a yea on the peaches, nay on the penicillin, thank goodness.”

“What about a birth certificate?” I asked, still hoping for a clue about the father’s identity.

“Nope.” Anne shook her head slowly, as if she was narrating a memory. “I had to pay for a fake one, just to get her enrolled in school.”

“Did Shen know she wasn’t yours?”

Anne shook her head again. “No one knew, except my parents, and I swore them to secrecy. I had to kind of back away from everyone I’d known for a while, to avoid questions I couldn’t answer, so for a long time, it was just me and Hadley.”