We shut off all the lights, and I head for the door, but Daniel grabs a soda and slides into a table instead. I follow him, the soft lighting of the Quarter filtering in through the large windows, casting slanting shadows across every surface. “Could it have been you?” he asks gently.

“My birth, you mean?” It’s something I’ve never let myself consider but that has haunted me since she left me at Moony’s. Was I the trigger for my mom’s first mental episode? Is that why she abandoned me?

He shrugs. “It’s possible. It’s a major life event.”

I fiddle with the cuff of my sleeve. It’s hard to imagine your birth that way, not the joy and celebration it should be, but a stressor from which your mother can never recover. “I guess, except…”

Daniel leans in.

“I found this photo in her room. She was keeping it in a frame behind one of my school pictures.” I pass my phone to Daniel, let him see the picture I took of the polaroid.

“Wow.” Daniel sees instantly what took me several moments to process. “This is the sister you mentioned?”

“Right.”

“And you never knew?”

I shake my head. “Not at all. My mother never breathed a word about it, and neither did Moony.”

“Moony?”

“My grandmother.”

“Glad I’m not the only one with a weird grandmother name. She looks young here,” he says, passing the phone back to me.

“I know.”

“And you don’t think maybe it’s a cousin’s or a friend’s baby or something?”

“No. I don’t have cousins. My mom is an only child. And she’s obviously crying in the photo. And why would she keep it hidden with my picture like that if the baby belonged to someone else?”

Daniel sighs. “You got me.”

“I think this might be the trigger.”

“Makes sense.”

“I know. So why do I keep feeling like there’s more?”

Daniel’s eyes are without shadows, and he looks directly at me when he talks. He cares in a way few people do. “I don’t know, Cat. You tell me.”

And I do. I tell him all about finding my birth certificate and those weird cards from Moony to my mom, the college in New Hampshire, the statement revealing the money Moony promised to me was gone. I tell him about the night my mother left me, and growing up with Moony, and how it could be so amazing and so awful at the same time when I lived with my mother before. I tell him about Gary and the fight and my mom’s weirdness at the cathedral and what she said about high school. I even tell him about the tarot deck I’ve been hiding for the last ten years as my only link to her.