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“Six. Usually.”

“Can you do me a favor?”

“What is it?”

“Don’t tell her about me.”

“Why?”

“It’s just better this way. I’m sorry.” Taylor swallowed and creased his forehead. “It, ah . . . it was nice to run into you.”

She opened her mouth to speak, to loose all the remaining questions fighting, rushing to the surface.

“Even if you don’t remember me,” he said almost inaudibly—painfully. He went toward his car and then stopped, turned, and reached his hand out, as if offering to shake hers.

Analise grabbed it. His touch released a thrill from her nerves, bursting her wide open. Taylor shifted his fingers, tracking them up her palm, and sealed them together. He didn’t look directly at her, only at their hands delicately lacing.

The door to the café clattered open with loud, high-pitched chatter. “Ana,” one of the Book-Hating moms laughed. “There you are. Willa thinks you ran off with this guy!”

Analise abruptly let go of Taylor, afraid of what was happening. Her phone rang. She wrangled it from her jeans pocket and saw the number. “Oh, no,” she said, flustered. It was the number from Mora Elementary. “It’s my daughter’s school.”

“You have a daughter,” he said, clearly stunned.

Analise swiped the icon to answer. “Hello,” she said out of breath, unable to fully register the voice on the other end.

Taylor mumbled a swift farewell, went for his car like a man on a mission, lowering himself into it, and starting it up. The school secretary told Analise something about her daughter’s missing lunch? She started after him, holding a stop sign hand like a fool, as if she could possibly thwart his now single-minded getaway.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Analise

Analise finished her shift at the café in a state of troubled nerves. She drove three blocks to Jorgen’s Autobody Shop to interrogate her tight-lipped mother. But Ulla Berglund was tougher to crack than a lug nut.

Maybe Ulla’s aversion to intimacy sprouted from the death of Ronja, her mother, and then later the estrangement from Analise’s father. Ronja died shortly after Analise was born, but from what—Ulla refused to expound, except for: It was a freak road accident, and I hate talking about it.

Analise bugged her great-godparents, Melia and Shorty, for answers, but they, too, were mum about Ronja’s death: Too painful to talk about. Ulla will tell you when she’s ready.

The townsfolk were useless, and when Analise snagged Oscar, the retired know-it-all police officer, who’d just interrogated Taylor, he’d only squint his eyes and say, What did Ulla tell you? When she repeated that it was a road accident, that the wrecker hit an icy patch, Oscar had replied, “Ah, well, that’s it. Was over twenty years, Ana, my memory’s fuzzy.” Fuzzy memory? Analise now wondered, especially after Oscar’s exchange with Taylor in the café this morning.

If answers regarding Ronja were difficult to come by, they were even more so regarding Analise’s paternity. Her demands of Ulla for details of her father, at least a name, came to no avail. As a seventh-grader, she once ransacked the house for her birth certificate and found:

Date of Birth: December 24th, 1987

Place of Birth: Cambridge, Minnesota

Biological Mother: Ulla Berglund.

Biological Father: (Empty)

But then, at Shorty’s funeral, Ulla and Melia were arguing heatedly in the anteroom before the service. Analise, still in her anti-seizure med-fog haze, was ready to abandon her raging, eighteen-month-old daughter and just walk out the doors and keep walking—maybe forever—until Melia shouted at Ulla, “Shorty never wanted this! She deserves the truth!” Analise collapsed at the doorway and had a seizure from the exhaustion and cloud of noxious, unbearable grief. Her great-godfather’s death made talk of anything emotional even more verboten.

The silent, weighted curiosity and wild speculation about her father grew into the invisible baggage she carried, never imagining the unbelievable would be added to that weight.

Not until she awoke in the hospital on her eighteenth birthday, with a diagnosis of retro-anterograde amnesia, Ulla’s adamant story of being beaten by an abusive boyfriend, and⁠—

A positive pregnancy test.

Here she was, caught in that same dreaded and tenuous dance of avoiding the answer to that delicate question for her eleven-year-old daughter, Penelope. Wait—you don’t know who my pappa is? Penelope, much more zealous than Analise had been and armed with the Internet, beseeched Analise to start a Facebook page so he could find them. Analise avoided social media—too many weirdos—although she didn’t put it past Penelope to secretly make an account at the school library.