When I raised my eyebrows, Dru shrugged. “Look, I had to come up with something. I was trying to be her new best friend, if only for a couple of days. I walked into that store already knowing from a couple of our friends that she’d had a baby and if I wanted to get more information out of her, she was going to have to trust me.”

“Because you wanted to see her baby.”

“Yup. That’s why I made up all kinds of lies about you and she couldn’t get enough. We only had a chance to chat for a couple of minutes because she was at work, but I’d given her so much juice about you with promises of more to come that I wasn’t surprised when she invited me to come to her place after she got off from work.”

There was only one thing on my mind. “Did you see the baby?” I wasn’t sure why I asked that question; maybe, just to be sure there was a child. Sonya and Cecily had been wrong — so maybe Dru’s friends had been wrong, too.

She nodded. “I did. I pretended I was shocked and told her I didn’t know she was married. She told me she wasn’t, but her baby’s father was.”

I groaned. “Jeremy.”

“She didn’t say.” Dru shook her head. “She never said it was Jeremy, and I’m not sure why since she knew that I knew you. I tried my best to get her to talk about him; I even hung out with her all day yesterday since Friday was her day off. I thought she would have said something, but while she talked about how she planned to be with the baby’s father and how he was going to leave his wife for her....”

“I can’t believe this,” I whispered.

“I didn’t push,” Dru said, “for two reasons. One because I wasn’t sure whether or not she was trying to play me and the second is I want to keep this connection to her open, just in case.”

“So, that’s it?” I closed my eyes. This was not getting any better. “You didn’t find out if Jeremy was her kid’s father?” I sighed. “Your trip was a total waste.”

“No, it wasn’t because we know a couple of things now. We know she’s not pregnant, we know she already has a child....”

“Who may or may not belong to Jeremy.”

“That’s true, but we’re going to find out.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I can take it, Dru. I’m already on the edge. I can’t wait until you go back to New Orleans to try to get more information. I just can’t.”