I duck into the fridge again and pretend to look for a snack. “Okay. But that Twitter account could still belong to an adult. A friend or relative of someone you work with. It could be anyone.”

Her footsteps cross the kitchen, and she tugs me out of the fridge and closes the door. “It certainly could. But I think there’s a reason you’ve spent the past five minutes arguing for that possibility instead of answering my question. Did you tell anyone about the baby’s gender?”

My mother basically interrogates people for a living. I don’t really stand a chance of keeping this secret. Yet …

“Is the rest of it true?” I ask. “Do you guys call her Baby Jane Doe? Because I didn’t know that, so even if I mentioned the gender to someone, I couldn’t have said anything about that part.”

“Yes, but it’s common knowledge that unidentified female victims are called Jane Doe. Anyone could have drawn that conclusion.” My mother exhales slowly, holding my gaze. “Who did you tell, Beckett?”

“Jake.” I sink onto a wobbly bar stool at the narrow, cluttered island. “But it’s not his account. He’s getting as much shit from this as I am, because people think that if I’m the mother, he must be the father.”

People at school, anyway. His name hasn’t come up online. Probably because he’s not on Twitter, so there’s no one to tag.

“Is that why you were talking to him about the baby? You feel like he’s in this with you, because people are giving him a hard time too?”

She looks so sympathetic that I almost hate to admit the rest. But I can’t be the reason the police fail to identify that poor baby.

“No … there’s more.”

Silence stretches between us, and I can see my mother trying to compose herself. It’s okay to get mad at your daughter, but it’s unprofessional to get mad at a witness. Visibly mad, anyway. The fact that I’m both daughter and witness is obviously uncomfortable for her. But that feels fair, because the fact that she’s both mother and cop is uncomfortable for me.

“Do I need to record this?” she asks at last.

I shrug. “I mean, maybe? I need to amend my official statement, so I guess so.”

She takes another deep breath. Then she pulls her phone from her pocket and opens the audio recording app and says my name, the date, and the time.

“Beckett, is there something you’d like to add to your original statement?”

She tucks her hair behind her right ear, even though it hasn’t fallen forward, and I realize she’s nervous about this. She has no idea what I’m about to say, or whether or not it will somehow incriminate me.