“Is that why … Mom, do you think he knew? Do you think he did it on purpose? Did he kill himself because he knew about the baby?” The seat beneath me suddenly feels unsteady, as if it could fall out from under me at any moment. Or maybe that’s the whole world.

My whole world is crumbling.

“I don’t think so, hon.”

But I can’t get that thought out of my head. What if Penn was right? What if my dad’s death wasn’t an accident? What if he knew what this baby would do to my mother—to all of us—and he took the only way out that he could think of?

“No, Beckett.” My mom scoots onto the bar stool next to mine and grabs my hand. Because evidently she can read my mind now. “Even if the baby is his”—and I can see how much it costs her just to say those words aloud—“the pregnancy wouldn’t have been far enough along for him to know about it. For anyone to know about it. Even the mother.”

The mother.

If Lullaby Doe is my dad’s baby, who’s the mother?

“Oh my god.” I’m repeating myself, but I can’t help it. “Mom, who is she? Does she go to my—”

“No!” my mother snaps, and her grip on my hand starts to hurt. The look in her eyes is fierce, in spite of the red ringing them. The veins standing out among the whites of her eyes like bloody little tree branches. “I can’t— Don’t say whatever you were going to say. We don’t know that yet, and I can’t think about …”

—school.

I think the word anyway. Because how can I not?

Why would my dead father’s dead baby be born in my school, unless the mother went to school there too?

“Maybe it’s a teacher.” I give my mother this hypothetical gift because it’s so damn close to Christmas. Because neither of us can stand to think that my father might have cheated on my mother at all, much less with a teenager. “Mom, Lullaby Doe’s mother could be a teacher.”

She blinks at me, and relief floods her face. That clearly hadn’t occurred to her, and in this moment, I understand how much like my mother I truly am. We both need answers at any cost, and the worst possible scenario is guaranteed to burrow its way into each of our brains, as if an earworm were an actual thing that could get into your gray matter and chew and chew and chew, until there’s nothing left to think but this one thought.

My father might have been a pedophile.