The silence that followed was long enough for the stove to tick twice. Grace took off her glasses and cleaned them on her sleeve, a delaying gesture so transparent it was almost kind.
"I don't know a Rebecca Carter," she said.
Maya felt something cold move through her chest. "She was your sister. She put you down as her emergency contact when she was hired at the clinic in Boston. March 1998."
"I've lived in Portland twenty years," Grace said. "Before that — I don't remember everyone I've known."
"She died," Maya said. "Six years ago. An aneurysm, in our kitchen in Denver. She was forty-seven, and I was nineteen, and I found her." She watched Grace's face. "You never came to the funeral. You never called. Twenty-five years, and you never once called your sister's daughter."
Grace's hand stopped moving on the glasses. For a second her composure cracked — just a flicker, grief or guilt, gone before Maya could name it. Then she put the glasses back on.
"I'm sorry for your loss," she said. "But I can't help you. I think you should leave."
Eleanor stepped forward. "We found a note, Grace. In the case file from the night my daughter was taken. It said the child was never meant to be sold, and it said to ask Rebecca's sister what happened that night."
Grace went very still. The color left her face in a visible wave.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, but the words came out thin, and she was gripping the edge of the counter now, knuckles white.
"You were there that night," Maya said. It wasn't a question. She was watching Grace's face, and she could see it — the lie coming apart at the seams, the effort it took to hold it. "The note says Rebecca had a sister. The hiring file says the sister is you. You helped her that night. You helped her get out."
"I helped no one," Grace said. "I was never in Boston that night. I —" She stopped. She had been about to say something else, and the unsaid thing hung in the air between them like a held breath.
Eleanor's voice was gentle. "Grace. My daughter was three months old. Someone took her from a clinic bassinet on a December night, and for twenty-five years I have lived in a house with an empty nursery. I am not the police. I am not here to punish anyone. I just need to know what happened to my baby."
Grace looked at Eleanor for a long moment. Then her eyes moved to Maya — to the young woman's face, which was Rebecca's face at twenty-five, which was also, undeniably, something else, something older, something that belonged to a December night a quarter century gone.
"Please," Grace whispered. "You have to go."
"We're not going," Maya said quietly.
The bell over the door rang as a customer entered — a man with a canvas tote, browsing the new arrivals. Grace seized on him with visible relief. "Let me know if you need anything," she called, her voice too bright. She waited until he was deep in the stacks, then turned back to them, and the brightness was gone.
"You don't understand what you're asking," she said, low and urgent. "If I tell you — if I say any of this out loud — it doesn't just touch me. Do you understand? There are people —" She cut herself off, glancing toward the customer.
"What people?" Eleanor asked.
Grace shook her head. She came out from behind the counter and walked to the door, and for a terrible moment Maya thought she was going to lock them in or throw them out. Instead she turned the sign from OPEN to CLOSED, locked the bolt, and stood there with her back to them, her shoulders shaking.
When she turned around, her face was wet.
"Rebecca was my little sister," she said. "And everything you think you know about that night is wrong."
She didn't say more. She stood by the locked door with tears on her face, and the shop ticked quietly around them, and Maya and Eleanor waited — because there was nothing else to do — for the woman who had kept the secret for twenty-five years to decide whether she could finally set it down.
* * *
Chapter 13: What Happened That Night
The bookstore was smaller than Maya had imagined, a narrow storefront on a side street in Portland with NOLAN'S painted in flaking gold on the window. Inside it smelled of paper and rain. A bell rang when she pushed the door open, and a woman looked up from behind the counter, and Maya forgot how to breathe for a second, because the woman had her mother's cheekbones, twenty years older, and her mother's way of holding perfectly still.
"You're Grace," Maya said.
"I am." Grace Nolan came around the counter slowly, as if Maya might startle. "You look like her. God help me, you look like her."
She led Maya past the shelves to a back room with a desk and a kettle. She made tea with hands that shook. She did not ask why Maya had come.
"Your mother told you she was an only child," Grace said. It was not a question.
"She told me a lot of things that weren't true."
Grace set the tea down and sat across from her, and for a long moment she only looked at Maya's face, the way people look at something they thought they would never see again.