Is that why she’s suddenly back in my life? I thought she felt bad for what I’ve been going through, with the rumors, and the reporters, and the online vitriol. But is this actually just an attempt to ease her conscience? Does she feel guilty because I’m being blamed for what she did? For abandoning her stillborn daughter on the floor of the locker room?

Is that why she’s been so involved with the fundraiser and the vigil? So that she’ll have a place to visit her secret daughter?

“Hey,” I say, while unspoken questions tumble around in my head like shoes clunking in the dryer.

“Hey.” Amira’s gaze stays locked on Sophia. Her unlit candle hangs at her side, clutched in a white-knuckled fist.

I wonder what she’s thinking.

Suddenly she turns to look at Penn, but my brother doesn’t notice. He truly doesn’t believe the baby was his. Could he be wrong and not know it? If so, don’t I have a right to know that, considering how deeply snared I am in this whole thing?

In a moment of bold indignation, I step closer to Amira so she can hear me over the speakers. So that no one else will. “So, why didn’t you tell me—”

“When are we going to talk about the real problem?” a voice shouts, echoed by the staticky reverb of a bullhorn. The question bashes through Sophia’s hopeful tribute to community spirit, and her voice falters.

“What was that?” she asks, and even from back here—from over the heads of all these people—I can see the dread and disappointment wash over her. She looks like someone just crashed her third-grade sleepover.

“Lullaby Doe is the victim of an epidemic sweeping the world!” that same voice yells, followed by that same staticky echo. “The criminal devaluation of human life! The moral decay of—”

“Shut up, you fanatic nutjob!” another voice shouts before I can spot the woman with the bullhorn. I can’t tell who this new voice belongs to either, but as I stare into the crowd—as people turn, looking for the source of the disruption—I notice an orderly pattern of movement within the emerging chaos.

Pink shirts. People wearing short-sleeved pink tees over their normal, season-appropriate long-sleeved shirts are moving quietly through the crowd, converging on a point I haven’t identified yet. And they’re all carrying signs.