I squint. “That can’t be my signature. I never signed this.”

Savalo’s smile is tight. “I bet you get lots of mail having to do with your business. Maybe you forgot.”

I shake my head. “I never got any legal documents. Not recently, and certainly not last week. Besides, what does this prove?”

“The cops think it proves that you were aware that your son’s natural mother was attempting to regain custody of her child,” she says, speaking very carefully.

My hands begin to tremble and the photocopy flutters to the floor of the holding cell. “That’s impossible,” I tell her, my voice sounding hollow. “Tommy’s mother is dead. Both of his parents died in a taxicab accident. In Puerto Rico.”

Ms. Savalo scoops up the photocopy. “The suit was filed by one Enrico D. Vargas, Esquire, office listed in Queens. I checked. He’s an attorney, duly registered in the state of New York.”

“I don’t understand.” Thinking that should be my mantra, so many things I didn’t understand.

“The petition to reassign custody was filed by a Teresa Alonzo, no address given, other than the lawyer’s office,” Ms. Savalo explains. “In the long run they can’t prevent us from discovering where she resides, but it will take a while. We’ll have to petition the court.” She pauses, locks eyes with me. “Are you absolutely sure you’ve never heard from Enrico Vargas? That Attorney Vargas hasn’t contacted you, or a lawyer representing you?”

“I’ve never heard of him,” I respond weakly. “Birth mother? This can’t be real. It can’t. Tommy’s parents are dead. They told us.”

“Who told you, Mrs. Bickford?”

“The adoption agency. Family Finders.”

“You saw the death certificates of the child’s parents?”

I shake my head. “I don’t recall seeing death certificates. We had no reason to disbelieve the agency. Ted checked them out before we applied, they were legit. Expensive but legal.”

“So you took them at their word, that the baby was available for adoption, free and clear. Nobody trying to assert custodial rights?”

“No, absolutely not.”

“Okay. We’ll check into that,” she says, tucking the photocopy back in her briefcase.

“What was Fred doing with that copy?”

“Fred? Oh, the deceased. No one knows for certain, apparently, but the supposition is that he went to your home to serve you with notice, or possibly discuss the possibility that you were about to be embroiled in a custody suit, or both. That he stumbled upon your plans to spirit your adopted child away from the authorities, attempted to intervene, and that you shot him. That to cover up the crime you invented a kidnapper. The man in the mask, as you call him.”

I can feel my jaw drop. “Oh, my God.”

“Obviously your position is that the abductor exists and that he’s attempting to frame you.”

My jaw snaps shut. “It isn’t my ‘position.’ It’s the truth! That’s what happened. Exactly as I told you. He took my son, he took my money. I assume he killed poor Fred.”

“Why would he do that? Frame you? Any theories?”

“I’ve been racking my brains,” I tell her. “No idea. Why would they care? They’ve got my son. They’ve got the money. Why bother going to all the trouble of framing me?”

After a pause, letting it soak in, Ms. Savalo says, “That’s interesting, the way you always say ‘they.’ I thought it was just this one guy in a ski mask?”

“He talked on his cell phone to others. Gave orders. I got the impression this was his business, kidnapping children and holding them for ransom.”

“Hmm. And we have evidence of the wire transfer. Not easy to trace through the Cayman Islands, but we’ll give it a shot. Okay, Mrs. Bickford. You’ve given me enough so I can have a conversation with Jared Nichols, the county prosecutor. Jared and I go way back, which may or may not be useful. At least he’ll give me a straight answer.”

She snaps shut her briefcase, slips into her heels and stands up.

“What do I do?”

“Wait,” she advises. “I’ll be gone an hour or two. Three at most. Then we’ll see?”

“See what?” I ask.

The attorney gives me a bright, reassuring smile. “See if I can work the old Savalo magic. Hang in there. Like the Terminator said, ‘I’ll be back.’”

A moment later I’m alone again.

After we got back from our honeymoon trip, Ted and I talked seriously about having children. We’d been having unprotected sex for more than a year and I hadn’t got pregnant, so a visit to the gynecologist was in order. I was put through a battery of tests—blood work, tissue samples, sonograms—and the results were not encouraging. Fibroid tumors. Not cancerous, but large enough to make pregnancy unlikely. I went through a long, painful procedure that was intended to reduce them in size. More than half of such procedures resulted in substantial reduction, supposedly, but it turned out I was in the unlucky half. No long-term reduction, no increase in the likelihood of impregnation. Most of the patients in my category eventually opted for hysterectomies. My option entirely. The fibroids were fertility threatening, not life threatening.

I offered to let my eggs be collected and fertilized by Ted’s sperm, in hopes of finding a surrogate mother. Ted ruled that out, in no uncertain terms. He was going to make a baby with me, in the normal way, or he wasn’t going to make a baby at all. Never mind all the legal and technical problems with finding a surrogate womb. And so we discussed adoption. Ted was especially enthusiastic about the idea of adopting—what did it matter of the child carried his DNA? It was raising a child together that mattered. Making a family.

As it turned out, finding an adoptable infant was nearly as difficult as dealing with the whole surrogate-mom issue, but of course we didn’t know that when we started. It helped that we weren’t insisting on a blond, blue-eyed baby. Hispanic origins were fine with us, although Ted was uneasy with the agencies who specialized in South American babies. Too many stories about poor women being more or less forced to sell their newborns, or having them stolen away and sold to intermediaries. Best to stick closer to home, where U.S. law applied. Eventually we found an agency with connections in Puerto Rico, were put on the list, and at last the great day arrived and baby Tomas came into our lives.

Could his mother still be alive? Had a woman calling herself Teresa Alonzo hired the man in the mask to take him back? But it didn’t make any sense—why hadn’t I been notified? Obviously if his birth mother wanted to reestablish contact, we could have worked something out. I wouldn’t have been so selfish as to deny my son contact with his birth mother. Would I?

Honestly, I don’t know how I would react. The notion that a birth mother might be involved is strangely reassuring, because if true it means that he’s still alive. But why empty my bank account? They’d have had no way of knowing that the money was intended for Tommy’s use eventually, would they? The man in the mask could access my accounts, pry into all my records, but he couldn’t read my mind, could he?

Truth is, I’m not sure of anything. I’ve never felt so lost, not even in those first nightmare days after Ted passed. Nothing is what I thought it was. The world is upside down, or inside out, and I’ve no idea where I fit in the scheme of things.

Except for this. I raised him, nurtured him, loved him to pieces, and this one thing I know: I’m the only mother Tomas “Tommy” Bickford has ever known.

15 what he lives for

After an eternity—nearly four hours, by my later reckoning—Maria Savalo returns to my holding cell with a smile on her face and a bounce in her step. She’s carrying her briefcase in one hand and a shopping bag in the other.