Maya folded the note along its old creases and slipped it into her pocket. Seven words. The child was never meant to be sold.
Eleanor picked up the phone on the desk. "Sam kept copies of everything from the investigation. If he has a personnel file —"
"Call him," Maya said.
Sam Okafor answered on the third ring. Eleanor put him on speaker and explained, her voice level, about the envelope and the note. There was a long silence on his end.
"Eleanor," he said finally, "I need you to read me that note. Word for word."
She did. When she finished, he exhaled slowly. "I never saw that note. It wasn't in the file I handed over."
"Then who kept it?" Maya asked.
"Someone who was afraid of it," Sam said. "Listen. Personnel records from the clinic — I copied the night staff's hiring files back in 2001, before the lawyers locked everything down. Emergency contacts, next of kin. Let me look."
They waited. Eleanor could hear paper moving, drawers opening, the small sounds of a retired detective's study. Maya stood at the window with her arms crossed, watching the street.
"Here," Sam said. "Rebecca Carter, hired March 1998. Emergency contact —" He paused. "Grace Nolan. Relationship: sister. Address in Portland, Maine."
Maya turned from the window. "Portland."
"There's a phone number, but it's twenty-five years old," Sam said. "If that note is real, then someone in that clinic was planning to sell a baby, and Rebecca knew about it. A woman who steals a child to save it doesn't tell the police. She runs."
"She ran to Denver," Maya said quietly.
"She ran," Sam agreed. "And she told no one. Not even you."
After he hung up, the two women sat with the note and the roster spread on the desk like pieces of a map. Margaret brought tea neither of them drank.
"Portland's two hours," Eleanor said. "We could drive up tomorrow."
Maya thought about the emergency contact line in her mother's own hand on a hiring form twenty-eight years ago. All those years of "just the three of us," and there had been a fourth person all along, living two hours north in Maine, keeping the secret with her.
"Tomorrow," Maya said.
On the bus back to her apartment, she took the note out and read it again. A woman across the aisle glanced over, then away. Maya realized she was crying only when a tear landed on the paper, blurring the word "sold." She blotted it carefully with her thumb, as if she could undo the damage, and stared out at Boston going past in the dark — the city where she had been born, or stolen, or saved, she no longer knew which.
* * *
Chapter 12: Portland
They drove north on I-95 under a flat gray sky, Eleanor at the wheel, Maya navigating from her phone. The bookstore — "Nolan's Books," according to the listing Sam had found — sat on a side street in Portland's Old Port, between a bakery and a shop that sold nothing but candles.
Eleanor parked two blocks away. For a minute neither of them moved.
"She might not talk to us," Maya said.
"She might not," Eleanor agreed. "But she's kept a secret for twenty-five years. People who keep secrets that long are usually tired."
The bell over the door rang when they entered. The shop was narrow and warm, shelves crammed floor to ceiling, a wood stove ticking in the corner. A woman stood behind the counter, pricing a stack of paperbacks with a pencil. She was fifty-eight, Eleanor knew, though she looked older — gray hair pulled back, reading glasses low on her nose, ink on her fingers.
Grace Nolan looked up, and her face changed.
It was not surprise. It was recognition — immediate, total, and terrified. Her eyes went first to Eleanor, then to Maya, and stopped there, on Maya's face, as if she had seen a ghost she had been expecting for twenty-five years.
"Can I help you?" she said. Her voice was steady, but she set the pencil down very carefully, the way people do when their hands want to shake.
"I'm Eleanor Whitmore," Eleanor said. "This is Maya Carter."
Grace's gaze flicked to Maya again. "Carter," she repeated.
"Rebecca's daughter," Maya said.