Then she was out of the shop and on the sidewalk, and there were tears in her eyes. She wiped them angrily away. She had nothing to complain about. Her family had been loving, caring, supportive, always there for her. They’d brought her up to be the person she was today.

But it still felt as if her life had suddenly turned upside down, as if the rug had been yanked out from under her. She’d just found out that her brother wasn’t her real brother, her parents hadn’t been her real parents. She was related to strangers she didn’t even know, and she wasn’t related to the people she knew and loved.

On the scale of problems, it was low priority. She wasn’t a crack-addicted teenager knocked up by her stepfather. She wasn’t a battered wife with no education and no prospects. Like anorexia and bulimia, hers was strictly an affluent, upwardly mobile concern.

But it still had a major impact on her life.

Who were her biological parents?

That was the big question. She tried to remember something from before she’d been adopted, some scrap of memory from her previous life, but as hard as she tried to recall the past, her mind remained stubbornly in the present.

She never thought much about her early childhood, she realized, and when she did her thoughts were confined to specific subjects, specific instances, specific images. She’d never stopped to analyze it before, but she understood now that the reason was because most of her early years were a blank.

She frowned. Not noticing that she never thought about her childhood, not wondering why, was as strange as the memory blank itself.

It was all strange, and she was tempted to ascribe a deliberate design to it, to recognize a supernatural reason behind it all, but she knew that was stupid. It was probably the dreams that had put her in this frame of mind, that had encouraged her to see anything unusual in this. The truth was, it was probably a perfectly natural reaction for a child to block out memories of parents who had died that early in her life.

Died?

Yes. Her biological parents had died. She knew that much. She could not remember how or why, could not bring to mind any specifics, but the certainty was there, so strong that even though she had no memories or concrete proof, she did not doubt it.

Laurie paused at the corner, thought about crossing the street, but turned right instead. In a kind of daze, she stopped at a coffee stand, bought a mocha, and continued on up the sidewalk.