Two lines. Fourteen words.
"The child was never meant to be sold." "Ask Rebecca's sister what happened that night."
Maya read it twice. "What is this?"
"I don't know," Eleanor said. "Someone put it in the file. Someone who knew."
"Rebecca's sister." Maya looked up. "Rebecca never told me she had a sister."
They looked at each other across the folding table, fluorescent light humming, dust hanging in the air.
"All my life," Maya said, "it was just us. Mom, Dad, me. No aunts, no uncles, no cousins. When I asked, Mom said her family was — " She stopped. "She said her family was complicated, and Dad would change the subject. I thought she meant a fight. I thought — " Her voice cracked. "I thought she just didn't like them."
Eleanor reached out, then stopped herself, her hand hovering. Maya nodded, and Eleanor took her hand.
"I'm calmer than I was last week," Maya said. "Don't mistake that for being okay."
"I wouldn't dream of it."
The fluorescent light kept humming overhead, and a fine layer of dust settled softly across the open old folders.
"You hovered the whole drive over," Maya said. "You've been hovering since the restaurant."
"I'm practicing restraint," Eleanor said. "I'm terrible at it."
"You're okay at it." Maya's mouth twitched. "Mostly."
"Mostly is the best I can offer."
"Who circled her name?" Maya asked. "And who wrote this? Someone knew my mother was here that night. Someone knew she had a sister. Twenty-five years, and nobody — " She looked down at the red circle. "I need to find out who my mother was, Eleanor. The real story. Not the one she told me."
"We will," Eleanor said. "Together, if you'll let me."
Maya was quiet for a moment, looking at the circled name — in her mother's workplace, on the night everything changed.
"Okay," she said. "Together."
"She never mentioned a sister," Maya said again. "Not once. No Christmas cards, no phone calls, no stories. How do you erase a sister?"
"Fear does it," Eleanor said. "Or shame. Or love, if the love is trying to protect someone."
"She was protecting me."
"I think she was protecting everyone."
Marlene appeared in the doorway. "Find what you needed?"
"Not yet," Maya said, folding the note's words into her memory. "But we're getting closer."
In the car, Eleanor drove and Maya watched Denver slide past the windows.
"What did your mother tell you about her family?" Eleanor asked.
"That it was complicated." Maya turned the little plastic bracelet over in her pocket — she'd brought it, without quite deciding to. "I thought complicated meant a fight at Thanksgiving. Not — this."
"We'll find the sister," Eleanor said. "Whatever it costs."
Maya looked at her. "You keep saying we."
"I keep meaning it."
"Then stop waiting for me to catch up," Maya said. "I'm here. I'm in the car. That's the best I can do right now."
"It's enough," Eleanor said. "More than enough."
Maya's fingers found the little bracelet in her pocket. "Did you ever think — all those years you were looking — that she'd be a waitress?"
"I thought she'd be a stranger," Eleanor said. "I was right about that part. The rest I'm still learning."
Maya nodded, and looked back out the window, and let the word sit there between them.
Chapter 9: Who Was Rebecca Carter?
Rosa spent the first hour of the drive to Colorado Springs arguing about the radio.
"You are driving like someone on a funeral march," Rosa said. "This is a fact-finding mission. Fact-finding missions get rock music."
"My mother just got outed as a possible baby-snatcher," Maya said. "Rock music feels aspirational."
Rosa switched the station anyway. "Your mother saved a baby. Allegedly. And raised you like a champ. Both of those things can be true." "You brought the envelope."
It sat in Maya's tote bag on the back seat, the sealed envelope from the box, edges softened by twenty-five years in a closet.
"I didn't bring it," Maya said. "It's just in the car."
"Same thing, coward."
They didn't go to the house first. They went to the garage.
Benedetti & Sons Auto Repair sat on a corner lot with a leaning sign, and Sal Benedetti came out wiping his hands on a grimy rag. He was sixty-eight and broad, white hair ringed around a bald crown, and he folded Maya into a hug that smelled of motor oil and mint gum.
"Maya Carter," he boomed. "Your dad's kid. You only come see me when something's broke."
"Something's broke," she said.
They sat on upturned buckets behind the garage, Rosa leaning against a tire stack like she already belonged. Sal listened. Maya told it plain: the woman, the birthmark, the bracelet, the test. Ninety-nine point nine nine.
Sal was quiet. Then he said, "Your dad knew."
"What?"
"Rebecca called him from the clinic that night. Two in the morning, something like that. Said she had a baby in her car that wasn't supposed to be a baby in her car." Sal looked at his rag. "She said, 'Sal's brother has a truck' — no, wait. She called Daniel directly. Daniel called me and said, 'Becky's in trouble, I'm taking the truck.' He drove up there and he drove them both back to the Springs that night. I watched him come in white as a sheet and lie to me for the first time in twenty years."
"Lie how?" Maya's voice had gone flat.
"Said it was a friend in a custody fight. He couldn't tell me the truth. Not even me." Sal met her eyes. "Your dad drove that night, Maya. Whatever your mother did, she didn't do it alone, and he didn't have to ask why. He just went."