“She’s right,” Cam said, before I could reply. “Elle wouldn’t have left sensitive information in the apartment. So it had to have come with the baby. It had to be in or on something she sent with Hadley.”

“There wasn’t anything!” Anne’s eyes watered, and she swiped away the tears angrily. “There was just the baby in her carrier, a diaper bag full of supplies, a stuffed bear, over-the-counter medication and a small suitcase full of clothes. And I went through all of it over and over. I ripped the lining out of the carrier, the diaper bag and the suitcase when I was looking for Hadley’s birth certificate. Hell, I even cut the bear up his rear seam and ripped out the stuffing, then had to sew the damn thing up again by hand. There was nothing. No note. No mysterious P.O. box key. And certainly no X to mark the spot. There was just Hadley and the letter from Elle, asking me to take her.”

“The letter…” I glanced at Cam and was both relieved and thrilled to see the same spark of possibility glowing in his eyes. “It had to be somewhere in that letter. In code or something.”

“Yeah. Or maybe written in invisible ink.” Anne sighed. “Wouldn’t that be a bitch. All these years I’ve been searching for information, and it could’ve been right there the whole time, written in lemon juice, just waiting to be exposed by a warm lightbulb.”

“Anne…” Cam reached for her hand, and with it, he also got teary eye contact. “Do you happen to remember what that letter said? Exactly? I’m assuming you read it several times over the years…?”

“Yeah. You want to see it?”

I blinked, sure I’d heard her wrong. “You have it with you?”

Anne shrugged. “It’s in Hadley’s memory box, with a few of the baby pictures Noelle wrote notes on the back of—the date and the occasion. Her first steps, stuff like that.” She leaned forward and grabbed the backpack she’d brought with her, digging through the contents as she spoke. “They’re the only things she has from Elle, and I wasn’t going to go on the run without them. Of course, she hasn’t seen them yet…”

Because Hadley didn’t know anything about her real mother.

Anne pulled an old-fashioned cardboard pencil box out of the bag. It was pink, hand-decorated with Hadley’s name in purple glitter paint and accented with white daisy stickers—clearly Anne’s handiwork. She flipped open he lid and pulled out a folded sheet of blue-lined white notebook paper, then set the box on the coffee table and unfolded the letter beside it.

We all leaned forward to read.

As Anne had said, the letter was short and to the point. Just a paragraph long, with no obvious code or pattern in the letters, and no single words which could easily be identified as names.

Below the official request was the list of vital statistics Anne had mentioned, and below that, Hadley’s potential allergies. And at the very bottom of the page, there was a small ink sketch of a teddy bear with button eyes and a stitched X for a nose.

“Did Elle draw that?” I asked, and Anne shrugged.

“I guess so. That’s the bear that came in the diaper bag—the only toy Elle sent with Hadley. It was her favorite until she started school, and some little prick kindergartner told her only babies carried stuffed animals. After that, she put Harrison up on her shelf and she hasn’t taken him down since.”

A chill crawled up my spine. “The bear’s name was Harrison?”

“Yeah. Harrison Lee.”

That first chill spawned an army of baby chills that raised goose bumps as they raced across my skin. “Did you name the bear?”

“No, she named it herself.” Anne blinked as the facts clicked into place with the memory. “That was one of only two or three things she could say when I got her. ‘More,’ ‘Pwease’ and ‘Hawison Wee.’”

I glanced at Cam. “Do babies name their own stuffed animals?”

He could not have looked more surprised by my question. “I know as little about babies as you do. Maybe less.”

So I turned to Anne, but she was already frowning. “I don’t know. Hadley’s the only toddler I’ve ever spent any time with, and I didn’t question it. However he got it, the bear’s name was Harrison Lee.”

“So, are we all thinking what I’m thinking? That Elle gave the bear Hadley’s middle and last names so that—at least subconsciously—she’d always know them? Then she drew the bear at the bottom of the basics-of-parenting cheat sheet as a hint for Annika, complete with an actual X to mark the spot?” The bear’s nose, of course.

Anne shrugged. “Nothing has made any more sense than that, so far.”

I glanced at Cam and he nodded solemnly. “It’s worth a shot.” He closed his eyes, and as we watched, he muttered, “Hadley Harrison Lee.” His eyes rolled beneath his eyelids, as if he was actually scanning his own private darkness for light on the horizon. I held my breath, my mental fingers crossed, and if wishing for success could have made it happen, we would have found Hadley in that very moment.

But instead, several seconds later, Cam opened his eyes and shook his head. “That’s not it.”

“Reverse them,” Anne said, unwilling to give up. “Try it one more time, in a different order.”

While Cam tried again, I flipped open Hadleys memory box and took out the thin, four-by-six-inch photo album, staring at the baby whose picture peeked through the oval frame cut into the cover.