Then Rebecca took the infant back and headed across the park toward her car. When she was sure she was far enough away and that Charity and her friend had returned to whatever conversation she’d interrupted, Rebecca let herself truly cry.
Then she buckled the baby into her car seat.
During the ten-hour trip back to Tennessee, on the fifth stop for a fresh diaper and a bottle, nineteen-year-old Rebecca Essig realized it was time to give her daughter a name.
Delilah
When I was a little girl, I used to wonder whether I’d look like my mom when I grew up. I would put on her shoes. I’d stand in front of the mirror in my parents’ bathroom and try on her lipstick. If I turned my head just right, I thought I could see a hint of the shape of her nose echoed in mine. The curve of her chin peeking through the point of mine.
On my twenty-fifth birthday, when I’d found out that she wasn’t my biological mother, I’d been more worried about surviving the next day in chains than about living long enough to inherit the laugh lines she’d damn well earned. In the menagerie, I’d worried about getting free. At the Spectacle, I’d worried about getting free and getting even. And since our escape, I’d been almost solely focused on bringing my child safely into a world that would not, by any stretch of the imagination, be safe for her.
Yet it had never once occurred to me until the afternoon that I saw photos of “myself” being arrested in Oklahoma that, while I knew exactly what Gallagher had contributed genetically to our child, I had no idea what I’d be bringing to the hereditary party.
On the forty-minute drive to the Pine Bridge Sonic, I could think about nothing else.
Would my daughter inherit anything from me? How could she, if I’d somehow been glamoured to look like the infant I’d been exchanged for? If that theory were true, I had no idea what I was actually supposed to look like. Thus, no idea what features I could be passing on to my child.
I told myself that what I looked like didn’t matter. But that wasn’t entirely true. Iknewthe face I saw every day in the mirror. I knew the body I saw every day in the shower. Despite platitudes about beauty being only skin-deep, a person’s physical appearance actually carries significant importance, if only because others identify us by our faces and voices.
Because of that fact, there could be no better time for me to reclaim my own face—if I wasn’t, in fact, wearing it—than while Elizabeth Essig’s was front page news. But even if my face wasn’t actuallymy face, I had no idea how to restore the one I was born with.
And the larger question posed by that dilemma was: If I couldn’t trust that the face in the mirror was my own, whatcouldI trust?
“Delilah?” Gallagher leaned forward from the backseat and put one heavy hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Because you’ve been staring at that picture of ‘you’ for the past twenty miles.” Lenore let go of the steering wheel long enough to make air quotes with both hands.
“I’m just...” I clicked the button to put the phone screen to sleep, then dropped it into the center console. “I never really thought about the fact that I’m not actually my mother’s daughter until I saw the real me. The real her. Or whatever.”
Was Elizabeth’s mother actually my mother? That’s how the trade would work, right? Baby Delilah for Baby Elizabeth? But if that were true, how could Elizabeth Essig be a year younger than I was?
“You’re still Charity’s daughter,” Gallagher said. “In every way that counts.”
“Except that I have no idea what I’m passing down to our child from my biological family. Heart disease? Breast cancer? A propensity toward nose-picking in public?”
Lenore laughed, but Gallagher only gave my shoulder another reassuring pat. “My people have never suffered from any of those afflictions. It’s entirely possible that my superior genes will shine through and redeem our child.”
I twisted in my seat—as best I could—to raise both brows at him. “Superior? Has anyone ever told you that you have a real way with words?”
He shrugged. “Not that I can recall.”
“Gee, I wonder why.” I rolled my eyes and turned to face forward again, where I could only see him in the rearview mirror.
He looked distinctly less comfortable in the cramped backseat of the sedan than he ever had in the middle row of the panel van. “Superioris an accurate descriptor. Redcaps don’t typically die of disease or infirmity.”
Lenore snorted. “Could that be because they all live lives of violence virtually guaranteed to kill them before disease can take hold?”
His inarticulate grumble actually made me smile.
“Okay, I think that’s our exit.” Lenore flicked on the right blinker, then smoothly exited the highway. “If I’m remembering this right, the Sonic is...there!” Her swerve into the right-hand lane was less smooth that time, but we made it into the Sonic parking lot in one piece, and without being pulled over.
“We should park at the back.” I pointed at the third row of parking spots—the only row that faced away from the building. “That corner one’s open.” And it was also the closest to the Starbucks parking lot, which was separated from Sonic only by a concrete curb and a height difference of about a foot and a half.
“How does this work?” Gallagher stared in consternation at the touch screen to the left of the car playing a looping advertisement for the current specialties and items on sale.
“You’ve never been to Sonic?” That shouldn’t have surprised me. Gallagher’s particular glamour abilities made it easier for him to blend in among large carnival workers at places like Metzger’s than in fast-food restaurants and other well-lit venues.
