Ellen took her time taking my measure, then allowed herself another healthy drink of the concoction in her jar. “Around here, we’d say that a girl like you, making assumptions like those and talking that kind of talk, was getting a little big for her britches.”

Her accent was still coming in and out. I wasn’t sure what to read into that, but I did have the general sense that this could go badly.

A smarter person would have backed off. “I just want to know what happened to Ana’s baby,” I said.

“That baby is our friend Campbell’s half-sister,” Sadie-Grace chimed in. “Or maybe her half-brother? And there’s this girl Victoria, and she’s the baby’s—”

“Ellen doesn’t care about Victoria,” I told Sadie-Grace.

“There’s a lot of things I don’t care about,” Ellen commented. That, too, was a warning—that I shouldn’t get too comfortable here, just because we were related by blood. “And,” Ellen continued, “there’s a lot of things I do care about. My family. This town.”

Your business, my brain filled in. People asking questions was bad for business. And rich people coming around probably wasn’t great.

“Just tell us about the baby,” I said. “There’s no reason not to. Ana isn’t ever coming back here, and it’s not like whoever ended up with the baby is ever going to be in the market for another one. It’s been nineteen years.”

That earned me a heavy stare. My phrasing—talking about the market for babies—was tiptoeing its way closer and closer to the word sold. It was bad enough, from Ellen’s perspective, that Sadie-Grace and I knew her father had shown his gratitude toward Beth with a healthy check. The woman who ran this town couldn’t be happy about the idea that we knew—or at least suspected—that Audie wasn’t the first child she’d exchanged for a big wad of cash.

“Please,” I said. It would have sounded more earnest coming from Sadie-Grace, but I knew in my bones that she’d take the word better coming from me. There was a long silence—tenser for me than for Sadie-Grace, who didn’t realize that our situation was precarious in the least.

“If I tell you what you want to know, you’ll git?” Ellen asked me finally.

“Immediately and without any further questions,” I confirmed.

Another few seconds ticked by. Each one felt intentional. And then Ellen placed her forearms on the table and leaned toward me.

“Before you go getting high-and-mighty, you should know that with Ana, with that baby? I didn’t take a dime from anyone. That wasn’t business. That was me taking pity on a girl that your world had spit out like she was nothing.”