Epilogue

Careful,” I told Avery. At the ripe old age of eighteen months, she was getting bolder about climbing the booths in the diner. She’d been a serious baby, but as a toddler, she was pure, undiluted chaos.

Pure joy.

She was ours. Ricky Grambs had only seen her twice. I didn’t care. Avery didn’t seem to, either. We were a world unto ourselves. Soon enough, I’d be teaching her to build castles out of sugar.

But for now, my shift was over, and it was getting closer to dancing o’clock. Sweeping her up on my hip, I headed for the door—but didn’t make it all the way there.

“Pardon me.”

A customer. I could have directed her to someone else, but some customers didn’t really appreciate the idea of a waitress ever going off shift.

“Do you need a table?” I asked.

The woman’s age was hard to peg—older than me, but beneath the red kerchief she wore tied under her chin, her hair didn’t seem to have a single strand of gray.

“Why don’t we sit?” she said. Her tone very much implied that was not a suggestion.

My survival instincts kicked into gear. Why would we—

She reached up to untie her red scarf, then held it out to Avery, who immediately locked it in a little toddler death grip.

“I believe you may have been expecting my husband.” The woman stepped around me—toward a booth. “Toby’s father will find you eventually, I’m sure.”

Toby. Mine was the kind of quiet that didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch. Her husband? Based on everything I’d read, Toby’s mother had died less than a year after the fire on Hawthorne Island.

And yet…

“But for now,” the woman said, taking a seat in the booth and nodding for me to do the same, “you’ll deal with me.”

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I invented a new game to play with Avery, one she’d need to be a little older to join in on. I smoothed a hand over her baby-fine hair as she slept, unwilling to let her out of my sight, unwilling to so much as put her down.

I’d been given an offer.

I’d turned it down.

That was supposed to be the end of it.

But still, I couldn’t sleep. I sat in the rocking chair I’d bought at Goodwill, and I rocked my sleeping baby, and I played our new game, whispering into the night.

“I have a secret…”