She finally looks up from her hands, and the pain staring out at me from her eyes feels eerily familiar. It’s not the look she got when my screams woke her up, and we waited for an ambulance we already knew that my dad wasn’t going to need. It isn’t the clenched-jaw, hold-it-in pain she breathed through for three straight days while we planned, then endured, the funeral. And it isn’t the weary, almost impatient ache that flickers behind her eyes when someone we haven’t seen in a while hears about my dad and cracks her heart open all over again by offering belated sympathy.

This is my mother’s middle-of-the-night pain. Her two a.m.-glass-of-wine pain. Her ugly-crying-because-she-thinks-no-one-else-is-awake pain. The kind that wrings her out like a wet rag and leaves her limp in her bed, clutching my father’s pillow.

This is the kind of pain that will kill her if she can’t figure out how to let it go.

I don’t understand what’s happening right now, and I’m not sure I want to.

“I have to know, Beck,” she says at last. “Not for Chief Stoddard. Not for the press. And not for the goddamn governor. If that baby was my granddaughter, I have to know.”

Now I understand. She wasn’t just grasping at straws when she convinced Jake’s mother to let him take the paternity test by playing the granddaughter card. My mother was asking Grace Mercer to imagine a possibility that she has obviously been steeling herself for from the moment she asked me if Lullaby Doe was my baby. Only this time, Penn’s on the hot seat.

But he shouldn’t be.

“She isn’t, Mom.” I take her hands, because she’s picked that hangnail until it’s bleeding. “She wasn’t Penn’s baby, and she wasn’t your granddaughter. I’ll get him to send me that picture. You’ll see. There’s no way Daniela was—”

“Beckett.” She reclaims her hands. “This isn’t about Daniela. The baby could be Penn’s even if it wasn’t hers.”

I frown, trying to figure out what dots she’s connecting. “I don’t …?”

“You found that baby in Jake’s duffel bag. But she was wrapped up in Penn’s shirt. It’s ripped in the armpit, just like you said. On the left side.”

“Wait. You think I was right? That Jake left his bag here, and Penn used it? Like … he left that torn shirt in it?” I’ve never wanted to be wrong so badly in my life.

“Maybe. I think there’s a possibility that your brother used that bag, and that he left it at her house, whoever she is. But we won’t know for sure until we get the paternity test results.”