A thin smile crossed Donna’s mouth. “It was difficult. As I said, they were older, nearly in their sixties by then. Their generation was much different from mine; they didn’t know what they’d done wrong to have raised a nineteen-year-old daughter who was going to have a baby, but didn’t have a husband.”

It was the perfect opening for Annie to ask about her birth father. But the words stuck in her throat and, she supposed, in her heart.

“They sent me to a home for unwed mothers right in Boston. I could have run away, but that wouldn’t have been right for you. So I made it work. The home was run by nuns, and, though my parents weren’t Catholic, they were God-fearing Anglicans. Scottish descent, you know?”

When Annie was a teenager, she’d daydreamed that Donna’s parents had comforted her and tried to talk her out of giving up her baby for adoption, that maybe they’d even considered trying to raise Annie as their own. She had been, of course, still naïve then.

“The ‘home’ must have cost a lot of money,” Annie said. “As a laborer, it must have been a hardship for your father.” She wanted to ask if her birth father had ponied up some of the cash, but hoped Donna would offer the information.

“No,” Donna replied. “The nuns were nurses—it was actually a nursing home. They only had two rooms allotted for ‘their girls,’ so they only took in four of us at a time. We worked for our room and board; we did the laundry and kept track of their patients. We took care of housekeeping duties too. It was a big old Victorian right in Back Bay. Not far from where I later opened my antiques store. And you . . . you were born there.”

So, Annie had been born in a big old Victorian in Back Bay. She wondered how many times she’d walked past it over the years, never having known its history or its connection. For the first time since they’d met, her defenses began to melt away. Donna was no longer the mysterious birth mother who hadn’t wanted her, but a young woman who’d been trying to do the right thing for her baby.

“Were you . . . scared?” Annie asked, barely above a whisper.

Donna let out a laugh. “Every minute of every day. I was scared and I was afraid—for you. I had no idea . . .” Then she started to cry. She hadn’t cried when talking about Kevin’s dad who’d left them, or when telling Kevin and Annie about the cancer. Nothing Annie had witnessed so far had stirred such feelings in her mother.

Annie stood up to go to her when suddenly, an insistent knock—one-two—rattled the cottage door.