To be fair, I hated everyone who stood in the way of my high. That all-consuming hit of euphoria that chased the demons away was my only friend back then. Little did I recognize the face of the devil. As if stealing my past wasn’t enough, now that same devil came back to pilfer my future.

“Which daughter?” I had wondered aloud, me sitting on the same ratty sofa we bought off Craigslist, Bennett lying in his favorite recliner.

I hadn’t known when I showed up that random spring afternoon that my husband had given away my youngest child. Just like I hadn’t known that reconciling with Marin would cost me her life.

“I’m talking about Marin,” Bennett replied. “I don’t think she’s ever gotten over losing you, Josie. I’d hate to die with a lie stuck between all of us.”

So I took his advice and watched Marin from afar, waiting for the perfect time to reveal myself. The plan had never been to say my sorries and disappear. Reconcile, Bennett had said. And there was only one way to do that—by reuniting the Gilmore Girls. All three of us.

I never saw Bennett after that first and last time, but I had gotten what I came for. Everything I needed to know—about Marin, my other daughter, where they both ended up. While Marin had distanced herself from Bennett over the years, they’d kept in touch just enough to share the basics. I could work with the basics.

When I had returned to see him again, he had disappeared…taking with him my second-born child. Which complicated my plans to tell Vera, they called her, who I was and where she really came from. I had figured it all out—exposing the baby thief Felicity Portman to the police, reuniting with my girls, and living our best life, as the PTA moms who sipped wine out of long-stemmed glasses would say.

I admit I was furious when I discovered Vera was missing. Initially I suspected the parents had something to do with her disappearance. What else could I assume but murder from a couple that steals a baby, which turns up missing fifteen years later? Felicity Portman was the reason I had lost both my girls, and she deserved to suffer as much as I had. I thought the message I’d left on her work voicemail about Marin was pretty clear, proving that I could reach her if I wanted to:

“Felicity Portman, I know what you did. You are the reason she’s dead. You deserve what’s coming to you.”

After I found out Vera was alive—and hidden away with Bennett, no less—I felt mildly guilty for running Felicity off the road, but not enough to lose sleep over it. She did buy my child for a few hundred bucks, after all.