But at the moment, it also meant she couldn’t get away from Wilder Monroe’s stifling presence.

CarleeAnn Picknell. After all she’d done in an attempt to scrub the name from her brain, one mere mention shouldn’t be enough to send her stumbling back in time. To that day six years ago when she’d actually met the woman. One visit, one hour, one brief conversation . . .

Enough to make her wish she’d never gone searching. Because all it had done was left her wanting, none of her questions answered. CarleeAnn had been dying, the disease eating away at her body making coherent words all but impossible. Except for those few that had hurt. Oh, how they’d hurt.

“At least I did the right thing. Leaving you . . . at least I did that.”

There’d been no exclamation of regret or love or loss. No joyful reunion. No explanations. No, the pain of those words had been the only thing Sydney had taken away from her scant minutes in that sterile hospital room.

Well, and that photo . . .

Three smiling faces, young and carefree, rose in her memory.

“The thing is,” Wilder said slowly, cutting into her thoughts, blurring the image in her mind, “I can’t find a birth certificate with the right CarleeAnn Picknell listed as mother. I can’t find any public records that indicate she ever had a child. I’m trying to get a subpoena for her medical records, but I haven’t gotten that far yet.”

Sydney opened her freezer and riffled around, finally put her hands on a bag of frozen peas. She carried it and her glass back to the living room, handed the peas off to Wilder with a nod toward his knee, then returned to her recliner but didn’t sit. “What are you saying?”

He placed the bag of peas over his sore knee. “I’m saying what if CarleeAnn wasn’t your mother? What if, in taking you to that agency, she was simply doing a favor for a friend who’d died?”

Too many questions chose the same moment to flood her but she couldn’t figure out which one to ask. “There’s a pretty obvious solution, isn’t there? I can take a DNA test and—”

He interrupted her with a shake of his head. “Maggie was never married. Diana was adopted.”

And CarleeAnn wasn’t alive anymore, so there was no asking her. Sydney lowered into her chair, mind spinning.

“Look, there’s other things. Maggie says Diana called her daughter Cindy for short. Cindy . . . Sydney.” He shrugged. “Not all that different. Plus, you’ve got red hair.”

She stared at him. “Millions of people have red hair.”

“Actually, less than two percent of the population—”

“You really expect me to believe that based on a friendship from almost three decades ago, some hard-to-find records, and the color of my hair, I’m the long-lost granddaughter of a woman in Maine?”

“Don’t forget the name thing. There’s also the fact that the couple of extended relatives of CarleeAnn’s I’ve managed to track down so far don’t remember anything about a pregnancy.” He let out a long exhale. “But no. I don’t expect you to believe it. I’m not even sure I believe it. I’ve got clues, but not concrete proof. It’s conjecture.”