Callie fumbles to explain all this to Healy. “My mother gave a statement. She said she found the baby. She said—”
He cuts her off. “Listen to me. I don’t know anything about your mother. You’re related on the father’s side.”
“What?”
“You are a genetic relative on the paternal side. There’s no match linking anyone to the child’s mother, or anyone she’s related to.”
Healy gives her a moment to process, and when he speaks again his voice is softer, padded with pity. “You really didn’t have any clue?”
A chill moves through her. Her father. A figure she can’t picture more than the avatar in one of those profiles online. A shadow, a generic outline of a man.
And Baby Doe. A half sibling. Someone else in this world who might have stood alongside her. Might have helped edge away the loneliness and shame of her girlhood. Someone else who, like Jane, could have said,I’m here.
The soup is burning on the hot plate. And still, Callie can’t move to turn the heat down.
She forces herself to ask, “Can you see who the father is? I never knew him. My mother… my mother never even told me his name.”
“You’re the closest genetic match we’ve got. Listen, I know this will be sensitive to bring up with your mom but—”
“My mother is missing. She’s an alcoholic. And an addict, apparently. And she disappeared a few days after the last time I saw her.”
Healy says something on the other side of the line but Callie doesn’t hear, can’t take in anything else. She tells Healy she will have to call him back tomorrow, unplugs the hot plate, and walks outside into the bracing night air.
She needs to move, to work off some of this unruly energy prickling along her nerves. She paces around the outside of her cabin once, twice, then walks down to the shore of the lake, crouches into a squat, drops her head into her hands.
There used to be nothing she couldn’t make sense of in her work. And by cutting ties with her mother she had created an existence that felt tidy, clean. For a few years her place in the world felt clear and solid. She knew who she was and what she was doing.
And now? The whole story of her life feels rewritten. Who would she have been if she could have defined herself in relation to this sister? To have known she wasn’t always alone? And look at what has been taken from her. The hurt is sharp and personal now.
Part II
BLAIR
September 2023
Blair’s phone chimes.
I miss you, Henry says.
Lol. It’s only been two hours.
Send me a picture.
She snaps a selfie, grinning in her soccer uniform, her hair loose around her face, her cheeks still flushed. She thinks she looks pretty. Herself.
That’s cute… but I was thinking more of a Hailey Delman picture.
Blair has a feeling like a stone dropping in her gut. Everyone knows what a Hailey Delman picture is because last year Hailey Delman got into a fight with her boyfriend and he sent the pictures she shared with him to the entire lacrosse team, who in turn sent them to the whole school, spreading them like a virus. Blair laughed at Hailey like the rest of them, but the truth was, she was awed. By Hailey’s lips outlined with dark liner, filled in with shiny gloss. Her legs crossed, a thong that tied in black satin ribbon at each hip. No bra, just one skinny arm drawn across her chest. It was her eyes that shocked Blair the most. The steady stare at the camera. The eyes that seemed, in the half second it took for the camera to capture her face, to saydevour me.
And that’s what everyone did.
She wonders how Hailey Delman is doing. If she’s found new friends or if the photo made it to her new school, too. If everyone calls her the same names there. If a fresh start is ever even possible, whendeletenever actually meansgone.
I hope your silence means you’re getting undressed for me
She is standing in her kitchen, a half-eaten banana on the island, the last bite she took glutted thick in her throat, shivering from the combination of her cooling sweat and the air conditioning. She and Henry have been hooking up for the past six weeks, ever since they made out in the backyard at Avery Huang’s pool party. So far they’ve only kissed and groped, grinding their hips into each other in Henry’s room, or Blair’s on the rare occasion Blair is home alone. But things are getting more intense. Last week Henry moved Blair’s hand to where he was hard, underneath his jeans, and she guided his hand under her shirt, let his finger graze her nipple. She likes him, likes experimenting together, likes the tingle of anticipation she gets whenever she knows she’s going to see him. But she doesn’t know about this. Giving him a piece of her that she can no longer control.
She could take the picture just to have it and then see how she feels. File it away in the Hidden album on her phone until she decides what to do. No harm in that.
