“What I wanted to do was hand her over without any media involved, so I tried to find a number to call the child’s mother. She didn’t have a phone listed, so when Nama was asleep, I snuck out and went downtown. I looked for one of the posters with her face on it, then called the number.”

She looked at Helen pointedly.

Helen picked up the story. “Jules and her husband wouldn’t leave their boat. Night and day they were out searching, so the posted number was mine. I was alone the day that I got the call. At first I thought it was another prank. We had listed a substantial reward to anyone who found Nama, and most of the fishermen had set aside their work to hunt for her and grab a payday that was probably more than they made in a year. We had a few false leads, people trying to weasel the money out of us before handing over our granddaughter. When Carmen said she had her, I was so tired of it all that I called her a liar.”

“I didn’t want her money,” Carmen said. “When I told her that, she was taken aback. But when I mentioned the tiny birthmark behind Nama’s ear, she shut up and started listening.”

“The officials didn’t release that information in case we needed something to identify her that no one could replicate,” Helen said. “When Carmen said something about it, I knew that she might have really found our Nama. When she told me she was a Crowe, I was stunned, and then I was terrified. It was the curse that had dropped Nama into the sea and then hidden her from all the searchers only to deliver her to our family’s biggest enemy.”

“So you returned her?” Quinn asked Carmen.

“No, she didn’t,” Helen answered for her. “Nama had survived the unsurvivable, and I felt that if we took her back, something worse would happen to her.”

“What the hell kind of messed-up story is this?” Maggie said.

Helen nodded. “Back then, my thoughts were that this event had happened this exact way for a reason. Fate had delivered one of ours straight into the arms of a Crowe. That meant we should give Nama up as penance for the wrongs our family had done to the Crowes. If we did, the curse would end, and my remaining and future grandchildren wouldn’t be in danger. I thought that eventually the loss of Nama would bring us all together again as a family. We’d gather to grieve, and then heal.”

Quinn could feel herself getting angry. “Do you know how absolutely insane that sounds?” she asked the old woman.

“I do. But by the time I realized how wrong it was, the deed was done.”