aches worse. Or so he’d heard from anyone who’d had aches the last time he’d been in town.
In the living room, Becca sat on the same couch that had been here all those years ago. Owen sank into it so far he worried he wouldn’t be able to climb back out. Either the springs were shot, or he weighed a lot more than he had at eighteen. Probably both.
“Where are the boys?” Becca asked.
“Team dinner after football practice,” Pam Carstairs said. “They won’t be home for another hour at least.”
Becca pointed at the chairs on the other side of the coffee table, and her parents sat in them as if they were the kids and Owen and Becca the parents. He kind of liked it.
“What makes you think that you aren’t our daughter?” Pam asked.
“I’m the redheaded stepchild.”
Her mom stiffened. “You are not!”
“Mom, I don’t look like any of you.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“I met a woman today who could be my twin.”
Her mother blinked, then all the air seemed to leak out of her like a balloon punctured with a pin. “What did she say?”
“That we’re sisters.” Becca peered at her hands, which were twisting in her lap. She separated them, laid her palms on her thighs, and lifted her gaze. “Is it true?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wouldn’t the adoption agency tell you if I had sisters?”
“Sisters?” Owen asked. Plural? Where had that come from?
“Whatever.” Becca kept her eyes on her parents.
“You weren’t adopted,” Dale said.
“Dad, come on.”
“You’ve seen your birth certificate.”
“What does it say?” Owen asked.
“It lists Dale and Pamela as my birth father and mother.” She tilted her head. “How’d you do that?”
“Wasn’t easy,” Pam muttered, and Dale snapped, “Honey!”
Becca’s mom threw up her hands. “She knows. I’m not going to keep lying about it.”
“Why did you lie in the first place?” Becca asked.
Pam’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t want to lose you.”
“Why would you lose me?”
“Maybe you better start from the beginning,” Owen said.
* * *
“I lost several babies.” My mom’s voice was so broken I ached. “Over and over, they died.”
“You never said,” I began.
“I couldn’t. I … I…”
My father set his hand on her arm. “Don’t.”
“She needs to know. It’s time.” She drew in a breath and laced her fingers with his. “I was only a few weeks from delivering. I’d never gotten that far along, so I didn’t realize. How could I? The baby didn’t move like babies do.”
I didn’t like the way this story was headed, but I had to know. As she’d said, it was time.
“I went into labor at home. It was hard, fast. I had her here. She was—” Her voice broke.
“Stillborn,” my father said. “I suppose we should have called the doctor, the hospital. I don’t know. We didn’t. I … couldn’t. We buried her near the others.”
I didn’t realize I’d taken Owen’s hand again until his fingers tightened around mine, and I clung. “And then?”
“I would visit the grave every day,” my mom said. “Then one morning I heard a baby crying.”
She paled and her lips trembled. I understood. She’d thought she was crazy. Who wouldn’t?
“I followed the sound and—” She swallowed, smiled. “There you were. Naked, without even a blanket. It was July, but still.”
Raye’s words—almost exactly.
“You were in the woods alone. No note. Nothing.”
“They didn’t deserve you,” my father said. “So we made you ours.”
I saw how it had happened. My mother had been expecting, then she had a baby. Why would anyone doubt that the child Pam Carstairs presented to the world as hers wasn’t?
“No one ever came asking questions? No news reports of a missing baby?”
“No,” my mother said.
In a normal world, someone should have been searching for me. But if I’d time-traveled from the past, not so much.
“It never occurred to me that you were a twin,” my mother continued.
Triplet, but who was counting?
“Where was the other girl…?” Mom tilted her head. “What’s her name?”
“Raye.”
“Where was Raye found?”
“Side of the interstate between Madison and Eau Claire. Near New Bergin.”
“That’s a hundred and fifty miles from here. Why would they separate you like that?”
“The farther apart the babies were left, the less likely anyone would connect them,” Owen said. “It’s a lot harder to find two separate mothers of unrelated children than it is to find one mother of twins. Even harder to find a dumped baby that was never reported as dumped.”
“So how did Raye find us?” my father asked.
I wasn’t touching that question. Not now. Hopefully not ever.