Passports: hers and Nigel’s. Sam’s was not among them. Rewrapping the passports, Juno put them back as she found them and reached for the next, larger stack of documents. It was exactly what she’d been hoping to find—in a plastic sleeve were Winnie’s and Nigel’s birth certificates, Social Security cards, marriage license, and life insurance policies. Juno took everything out of the sleeve and then put everything back, one by one, just to make sure. There was no birth certificate for Sam, no Social Security card. That was odd. It was possible that Winnie kept it somewhere else, but Juno couldn’t imagine why. It was as if he simply didn’t have any documents. She knew she was jumping to conclusions, but what she’d been hoping to see was a birth certificate that would settle the matter and quiet the nagging voice in her head. She remembered Sam’s words that day in the park, the day he said he didn’t feel like he was their kid—“I looked for my birth certificate once. My mom said it was ruined in storage when all the things got covered in mold and they hadn’t gotten around to applying for another one.”

Juno had seen plenty of women come through her office who were just like Winnie. They were predictable in their order: Winnie wrote Samuel’s name in Sharpie on the labels of his clothes, she balanced his meals with the precision of a nutritionist, and his Halloween costumes had been handmade his entire life—there was an entire album of photos to prove it. This was not the type of mother who lost or forgot to apply for her child’s birth certificate; quite the contrary. Juno lifted her hand to the smooth patch of flesh behind her ear.

If Sam didn’t have medical records, he wouldn’t be allowed to attend public school. Right? Right.

Maybe Winnie knew Sam’s birth mother and had manipulated her into giving away her baby. To Juno, that would explain Nigel’s outburst. She was grasping, and a headache had eased its way into the back of her head and was moving toward her forehead in a crawl.

On to the last item in the box—it was rolled and wrapped with rubber bands like a fat joint. It took Juno a good three minutes to get them off, and it only occurred to her after that she wouldn’t be able to replicate the complicated wrapping system. “Is there method to this madness, Winnie?” she asked the room.