Maya let out a long sigh and threw an arm across Letty’s chest. The child was a whirling dervish while she slept, spinning this way and that, like Tanya that way, Letty thought. In their childhood days they’d frequently shared a bed in whatever mobile home or cheap apartment Terri was renting. Tanya thrashed around in her sleep, what Mimi called “starfishing,” with both arms and legs spread wide across the bed, driving Letty, many nights, to sleep on a sofa, or even on a pallet on the floor.

She gingerly removed the child’s arm and rolled over on her side, facing the window. She was almost asleep when the thought struck her with such intensity she sat bolt upright in the bed. She tiptoed over to the table, picked up her phone, and reread her sister’s arrest report from five years earlier, this time paying closer attention to the date. Tanya had been arrested, here in a unit at the Murmuring Surf, on February 2, 2015. According to Joe DeCurtis, Declan Rooney, her accomplice-slash-boyfriend-slash-husband, was already in the wind.

Tanya’s urgent distress call and subsequent move to New York had come only days later. Early February, and before Valentine’s Day, because Letty remembered feeling sorry for her heartbroken sister and buying her a tiny heart-shaped Whitman’s candy sampler as a joke. How long after that had Letty taken up with Evan? And how soon after that had Tanya announced her “surprise pregnancy”?

Maya had been born seven months later, a tiny but surprisingly healthy preemie with blond curls like her mother’s, and blue eyes, not the same pale blue as Tanya’s, or their mother’s, but eyes that Tanya described as “the deep blue of a mountain lake you wanted to dive naked into.”

Letty scrolled back to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s website, punched in payment information, then typed in the name Declan Rooney.

The screen lit up with citations. There were warrants out for Declan Rooney in Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade Counties, for fraud, theft by taking, wire fraud, and more. The only photo she found of Rooney was a booking photo taken in Jacksonville. It showed a man with shoulder-length, dark wavy hair, a square jaw, and a prominent nose. He did have lush, dark eyelashes, but nobody, thought Letty, would ever mistake him for a young Pierce Brosnan. Nobody except Tanya.

She clicked the phone for a screenshot of the booking photo, then put the phone on the nightstand. Maya burrowed into her side and sighed softly in her sleep.

17

“WELL?” EVAN PUSHED THE PLATE with his half-eaten breakfast away.

“Well, what?” Vikki Hill asked. She’d eaten her egg-and-bagel sandwich as soon as it arrived at the table, and now she was sipping coffee.