I couldn’t imagine how alone she must have felt.

Well, yes, I could. I knew all about being alone. But I couldn’t imagine being alone with a baby. Especially a baby that came with no warning and no explanation. And no instructions. Maybe that was why Elle hadn’t left her child to me.

Why she hadn’t left her with Kori was obvious.

“Okay…” Cam sank onto the chair opposite me, looking more hopeless and frustrated than I’d ever seen him. “So, just to sum up, we need to find and free a missing child, but we have no idea where she is, no blood sample and only her first name to work with. Is that accurate?”

Anne and I glanced at each other, and finally she nodded. “Based on what I know…yes.”

“Based on what you know…” Cam mulled that over for a second, then looked up again. “But what do you really know? What do any of us really know? I mean, is Hadley even really her name?”

“Yes. It has to be.” Anne’s confidence in her statement never wavered.

“Why? Because you’ve been calling her that all her life? Because Elle told you in a note? What if Elle was lying? She lied to us all, that whole weekend, just by never mentioning the fact that she had a kid.” Cam leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, and the bitter resignation in his eyes scared me. “Maybe she doesn’t. Or didn’t. We don’t know for sure that Hadley’s hers, do we? All we have is the written word of a dead woman.”

“Hadley is Noelle’s daughter,” Anne insisted, and I recognized the fiery determination sparking behind her calm facade. I recognized it, and I welcomed it. “She had pictures of Hadley dating back to the day she was born. Why would she spend so much time, energy and money on someone else’s kid?”

Cam shrugged. “You did.”

“Yeah, and I’m not done doing it. Because she was Elle’s daughter, and now she’s my daughter, and her name is Hadley.”

“You can’t be sure of that….” I said softly, when I couldn’t find a flaw in Cameron’s logic, harsh though it sounded. “Not one hundred percent.”

Anne turned on me, and I could practically feel the heat of her anger. “Yes, I can. I am absolutely sure of that because I know how Elle must have felt when she sent her baby to me. She knew she was going to die, and her child was the most precious thing in the world to her, and I’ve been walking in those exact footprints for the past two days. Tower’s men will kill me to get to Hadley—they’ve already killed Shen—so I’ve been struggling with the same mental preparation for her future that Elle had to face. And if I know anything at all, it’s that no mother would prepare to give her daughter a new life—a life of lies meant to protect her—without leaving her with at least one truth. Hadley doesn’t know who her mother really was. She doesn’t know who her father is. She doesn’t know what Skill she’ll inherit, or if she’ll ever see her home again. The only truth she has is her real name—one quarter of it, anyway. The name her real mother gave her, and the only thing that can never be taken from her. And Elle would never lie about that.”

Cam and I stared at Anne, stunned by the power of her words and her absolute conviction. And finally Cam nodded. “Okay. We have one name to work with. I guess that’s better than no name.” But not much.

He didn’t say the last part, but I heard it anyway.

“Okay, here’s what I suggest.” I stood and started opening kitchen drawers in search of paper and a pen. “You two sit and think of every possible name Elle could have given her daughter. Ithat nooncentrate mostly on middle names, since we have no idea who the father is, and she probably has his surname.” A child’s surname was entirely up to the mother to give—it could be hers, the father’s or any other random name she chose, though the rest of the world would almost always know the child by his or her father’s last name.

“I don’t know…” Anne said, as I plucked a black ballpoint pen from a disturbingly neat—and sparsely populated—junk drawer. “She has no pictures of the father, and there wasn’t a single mention of him in any of her personal correspondence or official paperwork. I don’t think she wants anything to do with him. And if that’s the case, why give the baby his name?”

Cam shrugged, and I continued my search for paper. “I think we’re skimming right over the most obvious possibility—Hadley’s father could be dead.”

I shook my head without looking up from the last drawer in the kitchen. “If he were dead, why would she hide his identity? Wouldn’t she want her daughter to grow up at least knowing her late father’s name?”

“Maybe she was trying to keep Hadley from his family?” Anne suggested. “In the absence of a will, orphaned children go to the next of kin. So maybe she didn’t like his family and didn’t want them to know about the baby.”

“That doesn’t fit the timeline,” Cam insisted, rounding the peninsula toward the fridge, where he plucked a magnet notepad from the front and handed it to me with a brief grin. “She named the baby eleven months before she died.”

I set the notebook and pen in front of Anne on the table. “So maybe she knew, even then. We have no idea how long she knew she was going to die.” And that was the root of the problem—we didn’t know what Elle had seen, or how long ago she’d seen it.