CHAPTER 22 Angela 
MARCH 2017
Three days after Angela requested that Tina put her in touch with Dr. Evelyn Taylor, Angela finds herself standing outside the doctor’s apartment door with a box of bakery brownies in hand.
After Angela explained her theory about “Maggie” to her initially skeptical, then increasingly intrigued wife, Tina emailed Dr. Taylor to ask if she might be willing to speak to Angela about her experience at the maternity home. Angela feels a squirm of guilt that they didn’t warn Dr. Taylor about precisely why Angela was so eager to meet with her. Tina just told her Angela had been reading The Jane Network and was keen to talk about it. Which is true, but if there’s the slightest chance Dr. Taylor was best friends with Margaret Roberts, Nancy’s birth mother, she might know something Angela doesn’t. It’s worth a conversation and some overpriced brownies to find out.
Dr. Taylor’s apartment is only a few blocks away from Thompson’s Antiques at the end of a quiet side street that will be gloriously full of lush leaves and flowering trees in a few weeks. Angela knocks on the street-level door, and a minute later hears steps on the stairwell. The door opens, and Dr. Evelyn Taylor appears. She’s tall and wearing jeans and a black sweater over a striped collared shirt.
“You must be Angela,” she says, extending her hand.
Angela shifts the box of brownies and grasps the doctor’s hand. “Hi! Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me, Dr. Taylor.”
“Evelyn, please. And it’s my pleasure. I’m a big fan of your wife, plus you brought baked goods, so we’re going to get on just fine. Come on in.”
She steps sideways and Angela crosses the threshold, climbs the creaky stairs to the second floor.
“Head straight on in,” Evelyn says from behind her.
Angela turns the knob and enters the apartment, which she instantly falls in love with. The trim around the doors, windows, and baseboard is all in the old craftsman style, painted matte white. Old-fashioned, but considered chic now that it’s back in vogue. The ceiling is surprisingly high for a second-floor apartment, the plaster design a repeating swirl pattern reminiscent of ocean waves. The walls are painted a pale sage green, fresh and relaxing. The windows facing out onto the street run nearly floor to ceiling, allowing the soft winter light to filter in between the floaty, sheer curtains.
“Coffee?” Evelyn asks with a smile.
Her gray hair is cropped in a short, smooth bob that flatters her fine features, and it’s that even, soft shade of gray, like a November sky. Angela hopes her own hair will gray that beautifully thirty years from now.
“I hate to be a bother, but would you happen to have decaf? I’m off caffeine for a while, as much as it pains me to say so.”
“I do! I keep some on hand for those late-night cravings.”
“That’s great, thanks so much.”
“Cream or sugar?”
“Just black, thank you, Evelyn.”
“Psychopath.”
Angela freezes, brownie box in hand. “Excuse me?”
The corner of Evelyn’s mouth curls up. “A dubiously scientific study says that if you drink your coffee black, you might be a psychopath.”
Angela isn’t sure what to say to this pronouncement, so she chuckles awkwardly.
“It’s more correlation than causation, I’m sure. Something about a preference for bitter tastes.” She winks. “Can I take the brownies?”
“Oh yes, thank you.”
“Go ahead and hang your coat up on the wall there. Make yourself at home.”
She disappears into the kitchen and comes back a minute later with two plates. She hands one to Angela, then sets her own down on the coffee table. “Defend my brownie from Darwin, will you?” she says, drifting off into the kitchen again.
As if on cue, a giant orange tabby cat slinks his way around the side of the love seat, amber eyes trained on the brownie. Angela snatches the plate up.
“He likes brownies?” Angela calls.
“He’s really more like a dog, to be honest,” Evelyn replies, her voice slightly muffled by the wall between them. Angela jiggles her foot and takes in the decor for a few minutes before Evelyn returns with a French press of coffee and two mismatched mugs. She sits down on the couch across from Angela and scoops the cat into her lap. “People think you can’t train cats, but you can. And this chubby gent here loves to play fetch and has a distinct sweet tooth.”
Angela hands Evelyn’s plate to her and digs into her own brownie before Darwin can try to claim it. They are both quiet for a few moments, munching and sipping. Angela isn’t sure how to open the conversation, but Evelyn beats her to it.
“So! You’ve been reading my book, Tina says.”
“Yes, I—” She swallows her last bite of brownie, then sets her empty plate down on the coffee table. Darwin immediately pounces on it, licking the crumbs and smears of icing. “Oh, shoot, sorry! Should I—”
“Oh no, let him have it,” Evelyn says with a vague wave of her hand. “He’ll have diabetes any day now, either way. Death by brownie certainly isn’t the worst way to go.”
Angela nearly spits out her coffee. This woman obviously doesn’t pull any punches. Maybe she should try the same tack.
“I’m interested in your time at the maternity home, actually. It’s a long story, but I was wondering about your friend who… took her own life. Maggie, was it?”
Evelyn nods, and Angela’s fingers start to tingle.
“So, Maggie wasn’t a false name you gave someone else?”
Evelyn looks up. Their eyes lock. “Excuse me?”
“You said in the introduction that you had given false names to the women you mention, to protect their identities. But your friend’s name really was Maggie?”
Evelyn hesitates. “Why do you want to know that?”
“I’m so sorry,” Angela says, her face growing hot. “I should have explained more to begin with, but by any chance, was your friend Maggie’s full name Margaret Roberts?”
Evelyn’s mouth falls open ever so slightly. “Why do you ask? How do you know this?”
Angela takes a deep breath. Both their coffees sit forgotten on the table.
“Because I think I’m close to finding her daughter. Or at least, I hope I am.”
The room is silent. Even Darwin has stopped purring in Evelyn’s lap, as though he, too, is holding his breath, waiting.
“How?” Evelyn finally asks.
“I found a letter in the store I work at. Thompson’s Antiques, just a few blocks from here. It’s a letter from the adoptive mother confessing to the adoption, which had been kept a secret until her death. There’s an apartment above the shop, where Margaret’s daughter lived, and I suspect it was just delivered to the wrong mailbox. A simple mistake.”
Evelyn sits forward in her seat. “When did this happen? What was the date on the letter?”
“Twenty-ten. I didn’t find it until a few months ago, though. I’ve been trying to track down the daughter, but I haven’t had any luck yet, so I shifted gears and tried to find Margaret instead.” She hesitates again. “I found an obituary for a Margaret Roberts, who died when she was nineteen in 1961, and I put the pieces together with an article I found about one of the maternity homes. It was St. Agnes’s, the home you and Margaret were at together. Wasn’t it?”
“Ye—” Evelyn’s voice catches. “Yes. I’m sorry, this is a bit…”
“I know. I apologize.”
Evelyn nods but doesn’t make eye contact.
“Tina and I should have been more up-front about why I wanted to speak with you.” Angela takes another deep breath. She’s half regretting reaching out to Evelyn at all. Maybe Tina was right, and this search for Nancy Mitchell is going to get too messy. “If Margaret Roberts is dead, I wondered whether you might be willing to meet her daughter, you know, as sort of the next best thing. Since I found the adoptive mother’s letter, I’ve felt a bit of a responsibility to connect these dots. If I can locate Margaret’s daughter, would you maybe be interested in meeting her? Telling her a bit about her mother, if she wants to know?”
Angela watches Evelyn’s features morph as a wave of emotions color the canvas of her face.
“Yes,” she says, her eyes shining. “I’d like that very much.”
A few days after Angela’s tense meeting with Dr. Taylor, she and Tina are back at their ob-gyn’s office for the results of Angela’s early ultrasound. Tina perches on the edge of a chair in the corner of the cool, brightly lit room while Angela settles herself down on the crunchy white paper of the exam table. The nurse today is a squat, curvy twenty-something woman with black hair pulled up in a puffy topknot. Her scrubs have Simpsons characters on them, and Angela likes her immediately.
“Is this your first pregnancy ultrasound?” she asks Angela with a toothy smile.
Angela hesitates. “You mean for this pregnancy?”
The nurse’s smile falters. “Yes.”
Angela nods.
“Okay, excellent. And you’re at, what”—she consults her computer screen—“about seven weeks?”
“Yup.” Angela’s stomach is fluttering with nerves now. But the good kind. Like a first kiss.
“Okay, good. Good. And how have you been feeling?”
“Nervous.”
The nurse nods sympathetically and types several words into the system while Angela waits. Tina catches her eye and winks. “All right, then! Dr. Singh will be with you shortly. Hang tight.”
She slips out the door and leaves Tina and Angela alone again. They can hear a child wailing from another room down the hall. A phone rings.
“Always lots of waiting, eh?” Tina says. Her hands are fidgeting in her lap.
“Ha! Yeah. The anticipation is kind of killing me, T.”
“Oh my God, I know.”
“Right?”
“Fuck.”
They both laugh. Angela shakes her head and lets her eyes wander across the walls, vaguely registering the crayon children’s drawings and public service announcements for the flu shot. A few minutes later, the door finally opens again.
“Hi, Angela, Tina,” Dr. Singh says, nodding at them both. “Nice to see you again.”
“You, too,” they mutter in unison.
“Well,” Dr. Singh says. “I have some more very good news for you both. Based on what we could see in the imaging, you have at least one viable sac in the uterus.”
“Did you say at least one?” Tina pipes up.
Dr. Singh is smiling. “Yes. There’s a shadow behind the first sac and they couldn’t quite get a clear angle on it during the ultrasound. There’s a chance you may be pregnant with twins, but we can confirm that today with a fetal Doppler.”
Tina is on her feet now, striding over to Angela. She puts her arm around her wife’s shoulders. “So you mean we can…”
“Listen to the heartbeat. Or possibly heartbeats, yes.”
“Ha!” Tina exclaims.
Angela can’t stop smiling. “We’re really pregnant, T!”
Tina plants a kiss on her forehead. They’re beaming like newlyweds.
“I’ll just get the monitor set up for you,” Dr. Singh mutters, busying herself with a small white machine Angela doesn’t take much notice of. “Just lie back, Angela, and lift your shirt. This will be just like an ultrasound.”
Dr. Singh squeezes the cold blue gel onto Angela’s midsection. She turns up the volume on the system and all three of them freeze, their breath caught. She glides the wand over Angela’s belly as the Doppler crackles. It reminds Angela of trying to tune an old radio.
A moment later, the doctor stops the wand and holds it steady.
Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump goes the machine, but there’s another strand of beats weaving in with the first. The most beautiful sound Angela has ever heard. A perfect harmony.
“That’s two heartbeats, ladies,” Dr. Singh confirms, and both Angela and Tina burst into tears at the same moment. Tina nearly crushes Angela’s hand as she squeezes it.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you, too.”
The moment suspends itself in time, drawn out and shimmering with a pale golden light. A precious and rare moment of pure, unadulterated joy.
“Congratulations,” Dr. Singh says. “You’re having twins.”