Evidently I’m going on birth control. I didn’t ask for that, but I’m not going to turn it down either.

This is the strangest moment of my life.

“Mom,” I say as we head toward her car. A truck is pulling into the lot, with a woman behind the wheel. Dr. Baker’s office opens in half an hour, though she’ll be closed starting tomorrow for Christmas.

“Please, Beckett. I’m tired and I need coffee.” She tugs her blazer closed against the cold wind and crosses her arms over it. “Can we talk about this later?”

“Yeah.” But we won’t. I already know we won’t, because there’s nothing left to say. She’ll bring home the pills, and I’ll start taking them, and I may or may not sleep with Jake again.

But none of that will change the fact that I’m not Lullaby Doe’s mother. And I don’t quite know how to feel about the realization that my mom is really, really upset about that.

Mom drops me off in the driveway with a whispered apology, then she heads straight to work, and for a couple of minutes, I just stand there on the porch, shivering. I want to call her back. To convince her to talk to me. I have the completely irrational urge to apologize for not getting pregnant in high school.

I head inside to go back to bed, but the aroma of coffee draws me into the kitchen instead, where I find Penn on the center bar stool, hunched over the old, second-gen iPad we all share. He’s holding a steaming mug and his earbuds are in, so at first I think he’s watching a movie. But when I get close enough to see over his shoulder, I realize he’s staring at his West Point application.

“Hey,” I say, and he jumps, so badly startled that he sloshes coffee onto the screen.

“Damn it, Beckett!”

“Shh …” I lurch for the roll of paper towels next to the microwave and toss them to him. “I need to talk to you before Landry wakes up.”

“I already got her a new cookbook. A nice, hardback one.” He rips a paper towel from the roll and blots at the screen with it. “If you want in on that, your half is eleven dollars.”

“No, it’s—” I shrug. “Okay, sure. Thanks.” I’ve been so distracted by the disaster my life has become, of late, that I’ve hardly even thought about Christmas shopping. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.”

“Well, whatever it is, can it wait? The deadline on this application is—”

“No.” I pull a mug down from the cabinet over the microwave and half fill it with coffee. “It can’t wait, Penn.”

He frowns at me. “Why are you up so early? And already dressed? And why are you drinking coffee?”