“A GENETIC TEST?”
“Yes,” Meg said.
“But didn’t she already know about her mother—and what happened to her?”
“No,” Meg said. “She knew nothing then, except that her biological mother had abandoned her. The ancestry test revealed her mother’s name, at least—I think. It was a month after that when the article was published about the Halo Killer.”
“Oh,” I said, while something danced at the fringe of my thoughts. When it didn’t strike right away, I stayed in the moment. “Weren’t you afraid of what she’d find? That she’d … leave you?”
Meg laughed. “You don’t have any children, do you?”
I shook my head. “Doubt I ever will.”
“When you have them, when they are so little that you can fit them in your outstretched hands, you think they will be yours forever. When you take care of them, feed them, hold them when they cry, you think you’ll be theirs forever, too. When they start school, you still make all the decisions—what they eat, what they watch, what they do. But then they grow. They change. It starts with opinions. Then defiance. But when they first ignore you, that’s when it hits home. No matter how much you believed it when they were little, they were never yours. They are individuals, marching through life just as we did. And just like we saw our parents, they see us. Family, definitely. An annoyance … often. But when they turn into adults, we’re mostly just an afterthought.”
“That sounds sad,” I said.
Her head shook slowly. “No, not really. I mean, maybe. But it’s also the happiest feeling you can ever have. Because you know you did it. You succeeded in the most important job that exists. You got them to their starting line. Even though the rest is up to them, you hold this little thought—that without you, maybe they wouldn’t have gotten there at all.
“The hard part, the part that hurts, is that … even though they forget, you don’t. You are always theirs. That never changes. They have you no matter what. Whether they call you that week or not. Whether they send you a card on your birthday or not. That never changes.
“Now, that sounds sad, doesn’t it? I don’t mean it that way. I just … When I bought that test for her, I knew what she must have been feeling. She was pregnant. She was going to have her own child, one she would have to protect and raise. One that would be hers for a long time. I thought she had to feel afraid.”
“Wait! So you did know she was pregnant.”
Meg nodded. “Of course I did. I’m her mother.”
“What did you think she was afraid of?”
“Not knowing. How can you raise your child if you don’t really know who you are?”
“Oh,” I said, leaning back on the couch in her front room. “I never thought …”
I didn’t know what I was going to say next, but it never mattered. Because in that moment, someone pounded on the door. Meg startled and so did I. She got up to see who it was. Before she got there, though, I heard Ginny Harris’s voice.
“Meg! Are you watching this! Meg!”
“Ginny, Jesus,” Meg said. “You’ll wake the baby.”
She opened the door. Ginny already had the storm open, and Max burst into the house, his hackles raised. Standing in the threshold, Ginny looked past Miracle’s mother, right at me.
“Did you see it?” she whispered excitedly.
“What?” I asked.
“He escaped!”
The world flipped upside down. I knew immediately who she was talking about. And the news paralyzed me. Ginny, for her part, watched my face like it was the best television show ever made.
“The Halo Killer,” she said with great drama. “He’s free.”