Now Ashley traipsed from hospital to hospital, government records office to government records office, and the evidence—or the lack of evidence—became impossible to ignore, crystallized. She sifted through every level of state, county and city bureaucracy. She badgered the system. She pleaded for information, for answers that weren’t there.

Intricate and fail proof though it might be, the medical and government bureaucracies of the state of Tennessee had never heard of the Wakefield family as Ashley knew it. As she had been told it existed.! There were no records of any Wakefields ever having lived, married, paid taxes, worked, owned property or given birth in the state.

No records of Richard Wakefield.

No records of Mary Winston Wakefield.

No records of Bartholomew Wakefield.

And no records of Ashley and David Wakefield, twins born on July 14, 1957, in Nashville, Tennessee. She told them she had birth certificates that had satisfied Piccard Cie, one of the oldest private banking houses in the world, but the anonymous bureaucrats shook their heads. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” they said everywhere, “there’s no record...”

Her life was a lie.

But Piccard Cie had their hand and footprints, their names—how? And all their lives, she and David had used the birth certificates the state of Tennessee now denied existed. Were they forged? How? Why?

“Do I exist?” she asked herself aloud, hearing the panic in her tone as she climbed into the rented car.

Of course you exist. You’re here.

“But I’m not Ashley Wakefield.” She studied her face in the rearview mirror. Whose eyes were hers if not Mary or Richard Wakefield’s? Whose cheekbones? Whose dark hair?

Think of something else, she told herself. There were worse fates than not existing.

What would she do if this meant they would take away her money? She scowled ferociously. She would work. Just as she always had.

She drove past a cemetery. Then—abruptly— stomped on the brake, did a three-point turn and swerved back to the cemetery entrance.

Barky had never mentioned the name of the cemetery where her fictitious parents were buried. It didn’t matter. Now any cemetery would do.

She parked in the shade and wandered in the heat among the gravestones, and she found herself wanting, and not wanting, to find two that said Mary Winston Wakefield and Richard Wakefield.

Of course she didn’t.

Of course she had to turn back.

She pinched a daisy off a plot and tucked it in her hair. She sat in the shade of a spreading oak, on a cool stone bench, and she smelled the cedars and the freshly mown grass and felt the loneliness creeping up into her.

And at last she cried, not for who she was, not even for who she wasn’t, but for the parents she had learned to know and love, and who had simply never been.

Late that afternoon, Sarah Balaton wandered around the new wing of the New England Oceanographic Institute, and she marveled at the exhibits, especially of the tiny sea creatures she’d never taken the time to notice. A plaque in front of the giant fish tank stated that there, because they were fed daily and didn’t have to hunt for food, prey swam safely among predator. She wondered if humans could learn something from that.