“Yes! Thank you.” I pressed my hand to my cheek. “This is very complicated but my sixteen-year-old daughter is probably going to show up there looking for Anna Knightly and I need—”
“Pretty girl? Long hair?
“She was. But I explained to her that Ms. Knightly isn’t here. She was quite upset. She said she had information about a missing child.”
“Where did she go?”
“I have no idea. She wouldn’t leave her name and she said she had no phone. I was concerned about her.”
“Could she be…waiting around? Outside maybe?”
“No, I told her Anna’s at Children’s Hospital with her daughter and that she wouldn’t be back for—”
“What do you mean ‘with her daughter’?”
I felt Emerson’s quick glance.
“Her daughter is very ill and Anna’s at the hospital with her.”
“Could she…could my daughter… She knows Anna Knightly’s at Children’s Hospital?”
“I did mention it. But I don’t think—”
“Where is it. It’s in D.C., isn’t it?”
“On Michigan Avenue. But—”
Jenny was fast. She reached between my seat and Emerson’s to show me the address for Children’s Hospital on her iPhone.
“I’ve got it,” I said to the woman. “Please call me back if you hear anything more from her.” I hung up and turned to Jenny. “Can you get the directions?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I tapped my phone against my lips, thinking. “She wouldn’t go to a hospital, though,” I said. “You know how she feels about hospitals. I can’t imagine—”
“Should we call the police?” Emerson asked.
I shook my head. “Not yet,” I said. “Not until we’ve exhausted every other way to reach her.” I didn’t want the police between my daughter and myself. I wanted
50
Anna
I’d dreamed of this moment many, many times, yet what was happening now was nothing like my dreams. In my dreams, I’d seen the girl. Sometimes she was a toddler. Sometimes nine or ten. Occasionally this age: sixteen. This perfect age that fit reality. Yet there was one thing in each of those dreams that was missing in the here and now, and that was the instant recognition that this was indeed my daughter. My Lily. The child I’d carried beneath my heart. Sitting in the small lounge with Grace—and she seemed more like a Grace than a Lily to me—listening to her speak in a voice so quiet I had to lean close to hear her, I studied her lovely, heart-shaped face. She showed me the letter, her hands trembling violently as she pulled it from her backpack. She told me about the suicide of the midwife.
I read the letter and was still filled with disbelief. I was being suckered into something. There’d been so much publicity around the bone marrow drive. Bryan and I had been too open about Lily’s disappearance in our attempt to garner attention and sympathy for Haley’s plight. We’d al lowed Lily and our ordeal to be written about, talked about, embellished. Now someone had fabricated a letter, a girl, a story, all to mess with my mind. But why? Did someone think I had money? If so, they’d be wrong.
Where was the instinctive maternal bond I’d felt in my dreams? The girl looked nothing like me. Nothing like Haley or Bryan. Her eyes were large and brown, but the shape of them was off.
“When were you born?” I asked, determined to trip her up.
“September first, 1994.”
“Oh, really?”
She dug her wallet out of her backpack, her hands only slightly less shaky than they’d been a few minutes earlier. She pulled out her driver’s license and handed it to me. I stared at the date.
I looked at her again. I was afraid to let myself hope. So afraid. I’d been disappointed before. Maybe the girl
“Do your parents know you’re here?” I asked. If she was for real, someone would be worried about her.
“My father is dead,” she said. “And, no. My mother—the woman who thinks she’s my mother—doesn’t know I’m here. She doesn’t actually know anything about this yet. Her friend figured it out and hasn’t told her.”
Her story was growing so convoluted that I was beginning to think it must be true. No one could make this up.
“Where does your mother think you are?”
