“Not quite,” Bradley said. “Lance is nine.” He caught the look on my face and shrugged. “My ex chose that name. Lance is all right. We get along. I get him. It’s the younger one, Amy, that I don’t quite get.”
“Amy?” I asked.
“She’s five. I picked that name. My ex got to pick the first name, and I got to pick the second.”
“I like it.”
“So do I. Her head’s in the clouds, though. She dreams all the time. Barely pays attention in school, just draws on the backs of her notebooks. She tells bedtime stories to us instead of the other way around. She makes up songs for her stuffed animals to sing and plays for them to put on. She has a hat with unicorn ears and a horn on it, and she refuses to take it off. Wears it to school and everything.”
I leaned my head back against the seat, feeling myself smiling. “You’re telling me your daughter is cute?”
“The cutest. Divorce is shit. Your kids either live with a split, or they live with two parents who don’t belong together and fight all the time. I don’t know what the answer is.” He looked away from me, at the rain out his window. “I thought I would do it different when I grew up and got married, but it didn’t turn out that way. I try to be friendly with their mother, though. I try to be nice. I don’t know if it’s working. All I know is that I don’t want to handle it the way Dad and Mom did.”
We were quiet for a moment as the rain landed softly on the roof of the car. I thought of the storage unit, the petty things Gus kept there, the box of wedding photos that Bradley had kicked in frustration.
“We can do better than our parents,” I said. “I know we can. We don’t have to make the same mistakes they made.”
Bradley turned to look at me, his expression soft and honest for once. “Violet, we don’t have custody of our kids. I got kicked out, then got laid off, and I’m living at Dad’s. You’re even worse. You see dead people, and your mother stole someone’s baby.”
I cleared my throat. “When you put it like that.” I narrowed my eyes at him as he smirked. “It isn’t funny, Bradley.”
“It isn’t funny at all,” he agreed, forcing the smirk from his face.
“Maybe there was a legal adoption,” I tried. “Maybe there’s paperwork.”
“Sure, a legal adoption,” Bradley said. “That takes years, but your parents never said anything or told you about it, and they could have their own kids anyway. A legal adoption that left no paperwork in your mother’s belongings or anywhere else. A legally adopted kid who was never taken to a doctor, never sent to school, and never had his picture taken.”
So Bradley Pine was the clear-thinking one. How far I had fallen.
The people in the park had packed up and loaded their car. They started it and drove away, leaving us alone.
You have to go back to the beginning,Alice had said.The real beginning.
All we’d found since coming back to Fell were dead ends. Where was the real beginning? How could we find it?
“I’m going to pursue this,” I said to Bradley. “I’m going to find out who Ben was and what happened to him. I’m going to come clean to his real family, if I can. You’re off duty. Take me back to the hospital and drop me off at my car. Go back to your life and forget about all of this.”
“No way,” Bradley said. “I’m in it now. You’re seeing Martin Peabody and dealing with stolen babies, and I’m supposed to rake leaves? Fuck it.” He raised his hands from the wheel in a helpless gesture, and then he smirked at me again. “Besides, you need me, Violet. Admit it. Youneedme.”
“I don’t need you,” I shot back, mostly by reflex.
“Uh-huh, sure. Because you love napping on bathroom floors so much.”
“Okay, you were useful thatonetime.”
“And when you passed out in the storage locker, and I called the ambulance?”
“It isn’t going to happen again,” I lied. Something bad was definitely going to happen. Probably much worse than fainting in a bathroom. This was Fell, and I was who I was, and there was Sister.
I felt a pang at not having Bradley as a bodyguard anymore, but I didn’t want Bradley to encounter Sister, just as I had never wanted my siblings to encounter her. It was safest for the others if I dealt with Sister alone.
“Just tell me where to go next, and we’ll go,” Bradley said, obstinate as an ox.
“No.”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose with a fingertip. “I’ve been thinking. If someone’s baby got stolen, they’d report it to the police, right? Which means Dad might know about it. Or he could find out.”
I felt the yawning pit of my fear of Sister, the inescapable trap of it. “Bradley, you don’t understand how dangerous this is.”
