All she had with her was a little backpack. “There’s a couple boxes,” Sandy said after thinking about it for a minute. I was relieved she hadn’t argued, but she didn’t look thrilled. She shifted around uncomfortably, wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I left them back at our old apartment. I guess I should probably go get them.”

“Come on, let’s go, then,” I said, hoping that forward momentum might keep her from changing her mind.

Sandy was rolling her bike toward my car when she got a text. I watched her face tense, reading it. “It’s Hannah’s dad,” she said finally. “I guess he texted me a couple times overnight. I didn’t read them because they were from Hannah’s phone. I thought they were from her and I just—I needed a break. But they can’t find Hannah.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“I’m not sure Hannah knows where she is. A day or two after the baby was born, she started talking about how it was mine, and she’s been acting like that ever since.” Sandy was still staring at her phone. “Wait, I might— Maybe she went down to where—to the creek. I called her that night, not until after I got rid of the bag and the towels in a dumpster behind that tanning salon Highlights. It was the only place that was closed.” Her voice drifted as she looked off, like she was remembering. “I didn’t tell her that I fell or anything, just that the creek was where I—where her baby was.” Sandy shook her head. “Anyway, I think there’s a chance Hannah went down to the creek before. I got this weird text from her once about ‘how beautiful it was.’ She didn’t say what she was talking about and I didn’t ask. I got so many weird messages from her. I didn’t want to know anything else. I just wanted her to remember.”

“Maybe she finally has. You need to tell Steve where she is, Sandy.”

“I know,” she said, already typing out a response.

Sandy showed me the way to Ridgedale Commons, a depressing two-floor rectangle that looked like a motel you’d drive all night to avoid. I pulled up alongside the curb in front, having a hard time believing we were still in Ridgedale.

“I’ll be right back,” Sandy said, opening the door before the car had fully stopped.

“Are you sure you don’t need help?”

“Nope.” She shook her head as she rushed from the car. “It’s not much.”

I watched her walk, wiry and strong, across the browning side yard toward a staircase on the side. She looked around guiltily before squatting down and reaching beneath the stairs. Her boxes weren’t “at” her old apartment, they were hidden under the building stairs. It was excruciating. I swallowed the lump in my throat. Things had been bad for me when I was her age, but not bad like that.

“Do you think, um, I could take a shower?” Sandy asked once we were at my house. We were standing in the little guest room with its excessively fluffy, overly fashionable blue-and-orange-hued bed.

“Of course, yes.” I was relieved for the time her showering would buy me to collect my thoughts. It had been so easy to want to rescue Sandy. Now that I had, I felt overwhelmed and unprepared. “Let me get you some towels.”

When I returned, Sandy was standing right where I’d left her, arms crossed like she was afraid of being blamed for breaking something. I handed her a stack of overly fluffy towels. Everything we had suddenly seemed outsize and unnecessarily inflated. Like I was overcompensating.

“There’s shampoo and everything in the bathroom if you need it.”

“Thanks,” Sandy said, stuck in the center of the room, gripping my towels. “I’ll be quick.”

“Take your time. I’ll call some more of the local hospitals.” I planned to call the ME’s office, too, to be sure there weren’t any Jane Does, but there wasn’t any reason to tell Sandy that. “Can I ask you one last thing?”

“Yeah, sure,” Sandy said, looking like she was bracing for me to set fire to the bridge I’d so carefully built between us.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” I said, leaning against the doorframe. “But did Hannah ever tell you who the father was?” It seemed unfair that he should be getting out of all of this scot-free, especially if he’d known that Hannah was pregnant.

“No.” She shook her head. “But I think maybe he was a college kid.”

“Why do you say that?”

Sandy shrugged. “Hannah always wanted to go to the Black Cat to study. Sometimes it was like she was waiting to see somebody. Looking out, you know.” She shook her head again, seemed almost angry. “Before it happened, she told me she was saving herself until marriage. But I think that was more what her mom wanted. She took classes on campus last year, too. Part of some super-smart-kid program she was in. Maybe she met him then.”

Shit. The Ridgedale University high school exchange program, supervised by Dean of Students Thomas Price.

“The night she had the baby—before she forgot it was her baby—she gave me all the stuff he’d given her, cards and whatever. In case her parents found out, I guess, and searched her room. I didn’t look at any of it, but I still have it.” Sandy motioned to her boxes, stacked along the wall in the guest room. “She never asked for it back. Maybe she forgot the guy when she forgot about it being her baby. I probably should have tried to shake her out of it. But I was afraid. You know how they tell you not to wake somebody who’s sleepwalking?”

“You did the right thing, Sandy,” I said without hesitating. “You did more than anyone could possibly have expected you to do.”

According to Sandy, Aidan had already checked for Jenna at the Ridgedale University Hospital, but, knowing Aidan, I called again, just in case. I had expected the process of inquiring there and at the four other nearby hospitals to take a while, with multiple transfers to the relevant parties, followed by long periods on hold while nurses referenced what their unidentified patients looked like. Matched them with my description of Jenna. But within ten minutes, I had established that only two of the hospitals had any unidentified patients at all—both male, both elderly. Apparently, actual Jane Does weren’t nearly as common as I’d assumed. When I called the ME’s office, they had no unidentified victims, either. Maybe it would have been different in New York City, but in Ridgedale, people evidently didn’t go unidentified for long, not even a baby. Soon everyone would know whom she belonged to.

When I ended the call with the last hospital, my eyes settled on Jenna’s journal, sitting on the edge of the dining room table. Sandy’s hand had lingered on it for such a long time before she left it for me. She said that I should read it, that there was a chance it would help us find Jenna. But I could tell that part of her also didn’t want me to. That she probably wished she’d never read it herself.

It didn’t take more than a couple pages to realize what would be the worst part of the story laid out in the journal: Jenna’s hope. By the time I’d finished, I knew why Sandy had picked that spot in the woods. And I knew that Harold, for all his obvious instability, had been right about what he’d seen. He’d just been wrong about the visions climbing out of the creek being the same young woman—a ghost separated by nearly twenty years. In fact, they’d been mother and daughter.

The bracelet I’d bartered from Harold. I’d forgotten all about it. Still in my coat pocket, I hoped. I was so glad I hadn’t thrown it out, which was all I’d wanted to do after I’d hung up with Steve in an embarrassed huff.

I went out to the coat rack near our living room door to dig in my pocket. Sure enough, the bracelet was still there—and there was that inscription: To J.M. Always, Tex.

“Um, hi.” When I looked up from the bracelet, there was Sandy wrapped in a towel, black hair wet and brushed back smoothly from her face. Standing there like that, she was even more striking than I’d realized. Truly beautiful. Her mother must have been, too. “Could I, um, borrow something to wear? I think I need to wash my clothes. If that’s okay.”