"Well, it's mine to make," I snapped. "I need you to give me a day before you say anything to my sister or her husband. I want her to have a night to celebrate. This could all be nothing, so the last thing I need to do is cause her undue stress."

"All right. I won't say anything," Jeff said with an unhappy glint in his eyes. "I wish I could go with you, but I have a lot of meetings tomorrow."

"I'll be fine." I ushered him out the front door, then locked up, and ran to my car. As I started the engine, I knew I wasn't anything close to fine. My world had just turned upside down. I'd thought the call I'd gotten from Ray earlier was the one that would change my life. But I had a terrible feeling it was going to be this one.

CHAPTER TWO

The three-hour drive to San Francisco passed in a blur of anxiety and confusion. It didn’t help that it started raining an hour into the drive, because the rain reminded me of the storm that had taken my mother’s life.

Or maybe it hadn’t…

But her being alive seemed impossible to believe. She had a different name, I reminded myself. Laura Hawthorne. Maybe I should have taken a minute and searched for Laura Hawthorne online instead of jumping in my car, but it was too late now. I was going to San Francisco no matter what.

As the windshield wipers wiped away the constant splatter of rain, I thought back to the night my mother died.

We'd been living in Los Angeles. My dad had tucked us into bed after reading one of our favorite stories. He didn’t normally do the bedtime books; that was my mom’s job. She’d snuggle into bed with us, and we’d talk our way through the stories. But that night my mother was out of town. She’d gone to New Orleans to visit a friend from childhood. My dad had made us dinner, which consisted of hot dogs and mac and cheese out of a box. Then he'd read us a story as quickly as possible, tucked us in, turned off the light, and closed the door.

Only a minute passed before I got out of bed and asked Dani to play horses with me. Dani said we were supposed to go to sleep. She loved to follow the rules. I ignored her and started playing with our horse farm. Eventually, she got out of bed to join me. It wasn’t the first time we’d stayed up past our bedtime. We’d loved playing in the shadows of our nightlight, in our own little world.