Once in the car and on the way back, Carmen picked up the story. There had already been so much said that Quinn struggled to stay focused. Her head was reeling with information overload and the huge secret her mother had kept her whole life. Now so much of it made sense. Her mother had never wanted her picture taken. She avoided social networking like the plague. She’d never bought a house, a new car, or anything that required credit. She worked housekeeping and nanny jobs that paid under the table so no one would ever scrutinize her credentials. She didn’t make friends, rarely had a boyfriend, and of course never claimed any relatives.

Knowing all this, it was still hard to connect the sweet, doting mother to the profile of a criminal, but Quinn had to admit, her mother had pulled off a crime that not many could. Her mother was a kidnapper. Or was she? They’d given Nama to her. But then, Nama wasn’t theirs to give. If the child hadn’t been declared dead at sea, Quinn could just imagine her mother’s face plastered all over post offices, listed as one of “America’s Most Wanted.”

It was too much. This couldn’t be real.

But it was.

She still couldn’t think of herself as Nama. It was as though the story was about some child from Maui. From a family she didn’t know. A tragic tale but one not connected to her.

Maggie was silent in solidarity, somehow knowing that all Quinn needed right now was time to process the new past laid out in front of her. Everything she’d ever known was a lie. The only family she’d ever had was a fraud. And that was a hard discovery to reconcile with the woman she loved more than anything in the world.

Elizabeth Senna—or Elizabeth Makena, whatever her name was—was just someone Carmen and Helen had talked into doing their dirty work. A paid criminal who took Nama—took her—to the mainland to hide her. According to Carmen, Beth was a good girl from a bad family, the only child of a couple embroiled in a dysfunctional marriage too chaotic to think much of the daughter they were neglecting.

When Carmen and Helen presented the idea to Beth, they told her she’d never be able to contact her parents again.

No love lost there, she’d told them. They wouldn’t know it if I fell off the earth and my ashes blew back in their faces.

What they hadn’t planned for was Beth falling in love with Nama and the role of motherhood. Carmen said that the day she’d handed Nama over to Beth, there had been an uncanny affection between the two.

Nama had nestled into Beth’s softness, preferring it to Carmen’s more matter-of-fact way of handling her.