“Don’t look at that.” My mother closes her laptop. “We’ve put in a request for Twitter to suspend the Crimson Cryer account, but the chief doesn’t think they’re going to comply without a court order. Which we can’t get, because the account hasn’t broken any laws or violated Twitter’s user agreement or content guidelines.”

I didn’t actually read the user agreement or content guidelines when I signed up for my account, so I’ll have to take her word on that.

“Can’t you ask Twitter who opened the account?”

“They’re not likely to comply with that request without a warrant, which we don’t really have the grounds to get. So, if you know anything about this, you need to tell me. If it’s a student, we stand a better chance of getting his or her parents to delete the account than we do of getting it taken down through legal action. I know you’re not the Cryer—”

“Of course not! Why the hell would I do this to myself?”

“—but no one else outside of the Clifford PD knew the gender of the baby, so if you told anyone …?”

“How do you know that? One of the other officers could have told their kids the baby was a girl, just like you told me.”

I shimmy between my mother and the coffee table on my way into the kitchen, where I open the fridge and grab one of the sodas Penn picked up after his run yesterday.

“I’m the only one in the department with teenagers.”

“Okay, but you don’t know the Crimson Cryer is a teenager. You don’t even know that the baby belonged to a student, for that matter. Maybe a teacher had her.”

My mother shrugs with her arms crossed over her chest, leaning against the framed archway between the kitchen and the living room. “We’re certainly keeping that possibility in mind. But the fact is that most teachers—most adults, in general—don’t have any reason to keep a pregnancy secret for thirty weeks. Or to give birth in a shower in the girls’ locker room, instead of calling an ambulance.”

“Is that what you think happened? The baby was really born right there, in the middle of a school day?”

“That’s what it looks like.” My mother sighs and lays one hand over her heart. “Beckett, childbirth is exhausting, and excruciating, and terrifying. And that’s coming from an army vet who had three epidurals. Anyone who gives birth alone, in a locker room shower, must really, really not want anyone to know she was pregnant. And that just doesn’t make sense for an adult in a professional career. Like a teacher.”