“Wouldn’t we look suspicious parking next to a coffee shop but not going in?” Gallagher asked.
“That would definitely look suspicious, especially with people already on edge.” I pulled a ponytail holder from my pocket and began smoothing my hair toward the back of my head with both hands. “So where could we park for a while without attracting suspicion?”
For a moment, no one spoke, but I got the distinct impression that I was the only one actually thinking about the problem. Most of my friends hadn’t spent enough time in the human world to truly absorb the dilemma or suggest a solution.
Then Lenore broke into a huge smile. “Sonic.”
“What?” As good as a chili cheese dog and a cherry limeade sounded, I wasn’t following the logic.
“You can buy a huge drink for, like, a dollar and sit at Sonic for an hour.”
“True,” I said. “But there’s no Wi-Fi at Sonic.”
“Yes, but in Pine Bridge, the Sonic is right next door to a strip mall that includes a Starbucks. Remember? We got your third-trimester slip-on shoes in that same strip mall. We might be able to order milk shakes and still pick up the Wi-Fi signal.”
“Lenore, that’s brilliant.” And I would have done nearly anything for a milk shake in that moment.
“Thanks!” Lenore snagged her purse from the end table next to the couch.
“I’m coming,” Gallagher said.
I frowned. “You can’t—”
“I’ll sit in the back. The windows are darkly tinted, and from inside the car, my size won’t be obvious. All anyone will see is a shadowy silhouette of a head, and I can use glamour to blur that a little.”
“But what if—?”
“I’m coming.” Gallagher punctuated his insistence by grabbing his boots from the floor near the front door. “Let’s go, before the Oklahoma police realize just how incompetent they are.”
July 1991
Summer in Oklahoma was miserably hot, and not as dry as Rebecca had expected. Sitting for ten minutes in the park under the shade of a public pavilion had already left her damp with sweat.
The warm weight of the baby in her arms wasn’t helping. The poor thing was like a little coal, even dressed only in one of the short-sleeved one-piece things Grandma Janice had found at a garage sale.
Rebecca’s grandmother had been shocked and confused by the sudden appearance of an infant in her house, but knowing that her youngest granddaughter had been replaced with a cryptid at birth made the impossible suddenly feel perfectly plausible. And the possibility—however far-fetched it might seem—that the infant from the bathtub might be the currency needed to buy back her long-lost granddaughter was too much of a miracle to discount entirely.
It was also too strange a thought to keep straight in her head for very long.
It’s like a game of musical chairs, played with three babies, Rebecca had explained to her grandmother several times over the past month as she’d warmed bottles and changed diapers.Charity’s human daughter. My human sister. And the cryptid surrogate we mistakenly called Erica for six years.
The woman in the mirror had taken Rebecca Essig’s newborn sister and exchanged her for a cryptid surrogate in March of 1980. Years later in human time, yet only weeks later in the fae world, that same woman had exchanged baby Essig—still an infant because of her time in the faerie world—for Charity Marlow’s infant daughter in Oklahoma. Whom she had then given to Rebecca Essig.
Across the park, Charity Marlow sat on a bench in another inadequate puddle of shade, pushing a stroller back and forth while she spoke to a friend who was watching her toddler pull handfuls of grass from the ground.
Rebecca itched to move closer. To hear what the women were saying. She wondered if Charity knew that the baby she was rocking wasn’t her own, or if she, like Rebecca’s mother, had been ignorant of the switch.
If that were the case, how was she ever going to convince the woman to give away a baby she believed to be her own?
Rebecca had thought of little else in the past month. This moment had terrified her, lurking behind every decision she’d made and every idea she’d had as she’d narrowed her search for Charity Marlow to the town of Franklin, Oklahoma.
Her only hope, as she stood and began to approach the women on the bench from behind, was that the baby in her arms and the baby in Charity’s stroller would be identical. After all, Rebecca’s sister and the surrogate left in her place had looked enough alike to fool their mother. Presumably the same was true of the third child snared in this strange, tangled web of fate.
Slowly, Rebecca walked closer to the park bench, praying that the child in her arms would keep sleeping. She was a temperamental baby who only seemed satisfied when her eyes were closed.
“...such a happy girl!” the woman next to Charity Marlow said, leaning down to smile into the stroller. Rebecca stood taller, trying to see beneath the stroller’s umbrella for a glimpse of her stolen sister, but the angle was all wrong.
“Yes, she’s definitely been a blessing,” Charity said, and even from two feet behind her, Rebecca noticed the sudden stiffness in Charity’s bearing. The odd note in her voice.
