Yes, her mother had rocked it as a single parent, and they were fine with it being just the two of them. Or at least that’s what they both pretended. When Quinn thought about her birth father, wondering if he’d loved her at all, she never let those feelings out. In those first years, undocumented in a time of no cell phones or social media, absent of photos, had he ever held her? Rocked her to sleep? Whispered things a father would say to a soft, tiny girl?

When social networking took off, Quinn had spent hours trying to track him down. Searching his name and going through every hit to see if that Wesley Maguire had any connection to California or Hawaii. Or carried a resemblance to herself. But she’d always come up empty.

After college she tried not to obsess about what it was that pushed her mother into leaving her family and culture—discarding it like wet boots after a heavy rain. It was curious. Her mother had traded all she’d ever known for a man who would prove to be disloyal, and a life on the mainland, in a small town where everyone thought Hawaii was a foreign country or simply a scene on a postcard.

Why?

She didn’t want to hurt her mother, so she held her questions inside, letting them burrow there and grow thorns.

Then the cancer came. Soon they were battling two long years of sickness that led to the confession, then death.

Her mother’s passing had only opened the door to more questions. Like where did the inheritance money come from? The money was one of the biggest surprises of Quinn’s life. She’d expected the estate attorney to tell her there was next to nothing left after paying the medical bills. Instead she’d been given a small fortune. She should’ve been really happy at such a windfall, but it was perplexing why her mother hadn’t used some of the money over the years. While their lifestyle had been comfortable, it was modest, to say the least. Quinn wanted to find out more about the inheritance. Needed to find out more.

The note her mother left her was such an unusual action from a woman who had never wanted to talk of the past, but it pushed Quinn into endless hours of online research that led to nothing. She thought of the photo. She’d found a Carmen Crowe on Facebook—actually, about seventeen of them. But none of them from Hawaii or who matched the projected age. She knew it was most likely that Carmen had married and dropped the name Crowe.