When I could move, I sat down on the chair and our eyes met. “No,” I said. “I couldn’t believe it was Gracie. Her eyes were a hazy blue, but a few weeks after her stay in the hospital, they turned out to be green. So I figured she was older than most babies when their eyes change to their real color. And Matthew said that the doctors told him to put her back on just the bottle, even though she’d started to eat some baby food. . . .”

“You took care of Gracie more than Cameron did.”

“Yeah, I did. Cameron was so busy that year, it was her senior year, and I was home more because of the lightning strike.”

“Were you still having trouble with the aftereffects?”

“Oh, yeah, you remember, I had trouble for months. Before I learned to cope. I had terrible headaches, and a lot of pain. But I did my best for Gracie and Mariella,” I said, knowing I sounded defensive.

“Of course you did. You kept all of us going. But my point is, there might have been things you didn’t notice because you were having so many physical problems and you were so distracted by sensing the dead people.”

That had certainly been a terrible time in my life. Teenagers are ill equipped to cope with a huge gaping difference between themselves and other teens. “Your point is that I might not have noticed some changes in the baby? You think Matthew left with one baby and came back with another. You’re saying the real Gracie is dead.”

He nodded. “It was Chip who came to the trailer some,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I remember him. Maybe Drex, too, but Chip for sure. He had some drug deals with my dad.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “I thought they looked a bit familiar. And if one of them took Dr. Bowden out to the ranch that night, and they wanted to get rid of a baby without killing it . . .”

“They might have called Matthew, who had a real sick baby that wasn’t going to make it.”

“How could they? How could they imagine that Matthew would switch babies? Why would they want to, anyway?”

“If the baby was the biological child of Rich Joyce and Mariah Parish, then she would be literally worth millions.”

I couldn’t speak for a minute. “But why not just kill her, and then the millions would stay where they were? With the three Joyce grandchildren?”

“Maybe they didn’t want to murder an infant.”

“They were willing to let Mariah die when she could’ve been saved.”

“There’s a difference between letting someone die and killing someone. And between a grown woman who was pretty unscrupulous and an infant child. More practically, they might not have realized how close to death Mariah was until it was too late.”