Genevieve apologized for how much needed to be done before Grannor’s estate could be settled. The sorting, packing, and shipping would take Colleen the whole summer, but the estate would pay her.
Pay? No, she refused the money. Nice girls weren’t paid for helping their families.
And she was grateful to have the project. It kept her from thinking about Autumn and Ariel.
The big second floor bedroom was so full that it felt like an attic. Colleen found three large flat white boxes, each labeled with a woman’s first name and a date. She opened the one from 1927. Beneath layers of brittle tissue paper was an ivory satin wedding gown. She lifted it out. Gorgeous in its simplicity, the dress was made of the glowingly liquid fabric that cascaded into a scallop-edged hem. The front of the dress below the waist was badly snagged; the bride must have caught her bouquet on it. Colleen held it up to herself. The bride must have been tiny. The dress was so narrow through the waist and hips that even Colleen wouldn’t have been able to wear it. The gown from 1905 had froths of beautiful lace, trimming the skirt and the lower part of the sleeves. The dress had been cleaned but was still stained under the armholes, and the fabric had rotten beneath the stains. Colleen looked at the date again. Yes, the wedding had been in the summer. This bride had gotten hot. The third one had an overdress of beaded chiffon, and the heavy beads had pulled and shredded the light fabric.
The dresses must have been beautiful once. What a shame to put them back in the boxes. Surely a talented seamstress could have created something new from them. The first one could be made into a baptismal gown for a baby. The lace of the second was exquisite and attached to the dress by tiny hand stitches. It was as if someone had expected that the lace could be used again. Perhaps the beading on the third could be used as a trim.
But these gowns weren’t hers. They were heirlooms and belonged to her cousins. She got fresh tissue paper and refolded the dresses.
In a brass-studded, leather trunk, she found the military decorations that were to go to Will. The trunk also contained packets of nineteenth-century letters, each bundle tied with a narrow ribbon. Some of the handwriting was spidery, some of it cramped; all the ink was fading. Grannor had told her about these letters. Colleen eased a few out of their envelopes. She learned about the weather and how many jars of plum jelly the writer’s cook was putting up. Grannor had told her that there were some written from Johnson’s Island, the POW camp in Michigan for captured Confederate officers. They needed to be scanned, and the originals donated to a museum.
Would Will, Jeff, or Kim ever bother to do that? Why would they? They didn’t care about the family legacy.
What would Grannor have done if Will and Jeff had been adopted by their stepfather? Would she have left the family Bible to someone whose last name was Gunderson? Would Kim then be her only real grandchild?
Two weeks ago she would have felt obligated to—she would have wanted to—look through the family trees and find more information about those brides. She would have written down their maiden names and their married names, noting the year that they died and where they were buried. But Grannor’s will told her that these women and their graves had nothing to do with her.
Then who am I? She had always been the girl everyone liked; she had never lacked confidence. Now she felt like a stranger to herself.
What if I am Ariel?
Ariel was the name of the character in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Except for the villainous sea witch and the leglessness-thing, it would be okay to be that Ariel. She was charming, spunky, and curious.
But at the moment Colleen was a more of a Cinderella, wasn’t she? The unpaid, but oh-so-nice spinster packing up other people’s heirlooms.
She might not know how she felt about being Autumn’s child, but she certainly did not want to be Cinderella.
She called her father. “You and Genevieve were right. This is too much work. I need to be paid for it.”
Her father was relieved, and when she told Ben, he was impressed. “You asked for money?”
“They offered. At first I said no. But I could feel myself getting even more negative about everything, so why not at least get a really great trip out of it?”
“Good for you.”
As she had predicted, seeing Ben so often in such an easy way—she cooked, he did the dishes and the grocery shopping—left her treating him like someone she had grown up with, like a friend.
Every afternoon he would come looking for her, offering to move heavy trunks or load up the car for a trip to the village dump. She could have done those things. She instead needed him to help her make decisions about what to throw away. Every check her grandfather had ever written? Six handmade, now-shredded, lace baby bonnets?
“Why do people save stuff?” she asked him that evening. “Letters, I can understand. They add to the historical record. But I am saving the dress my mother wore to all three of our baptisms. It’s beautiful and it’s real silk. But it’s emerald. I look horrible in such bright colors, and of course it is way too big. A seamstress said it would ruin the lines if I had it cut down.”
“Are you hoping that you might have a daughter who would wear it? My mom saved her wedding dress for Kate and Nina. My sisters weren’t interested so now she says she’s saving it for the little girls.”
“At least there’s a chance that your mother’s granddaughters could wear her dress. How likely is it that I will have a five-foot-nine red-haired daughter? And why does the DAR care about biological connections?” Colleen didn’t know if she was exasperated with herself, her grandparents, or a lineage-based service organization. “Can’t you be proud of the country and the Revolution even if you’ve only been here for five minutes?”
“I would think so, but that is a different question than saving physical artifacts.”
“We—the Ridge family, that is—has a set of flatware and a tea service that a former slave owner hid from the Union Army. Does knowing that make them more interesting or valuable? Grannor couldn’t find the piece of paper that said who had owned some engagement rings. Why does that make the rings feel like orphans? Part of me wants to find out about the brides who wore the dresses so that people know who they were. Why does that matter? The past is past. Saving a dress no one can wear isn’t going to bring it any closer. So why?”
“I have no idea, but—” He broke off and started to put his utensils on his plate as if he was going to clear the table.
“You were about to say something, weren’t you?” Colleen could feel her shoulders go up and her neck tighten. This still happened to her, the tensing, the anxiety that he was about to criticize her. “You started; you might as well finish.”
He wasn’t her friend. He wasn’t the boy next door. He was a man, a dangerous man, with broad shoulders and a long lean torso, with deep-set green eyes and knife-edge cheekbones.
“I was just going to suggest”—his voice was mild, slowly and softly Southern, the voice she had known her whole life—“that if it would make you feel better, why don’t we look up the information about those brides and attach it to the dresses?”
That wasn’t a dangerous answer. That was a friend’s answer. Why couldn’t he stay one or the other, her friend or her peril? “You don’t think that is a waste of time?”
“Not if it would mean something to you.”
* * * *
Colleen was dreading the Fourth of July holiday. She wished her friends weren’t coming. She knew that there were people who had to give up on their own families, who created families from their friends, celebrating holidays together, planning each other’s funerals, but that wasn’t her. However focused they were on their wives, she would never give up on her brothers. She would move to Minnesota and risk freezing to death rather than live without family.
Autumn’s Are You Ariel? show would be on over the holiday. It would be strange watching it with her friends. None of them seemed to know that she was adopted.
“I didn’t think you ever hid that,” Ben said when she told him. The moments when he seemed to be her friend were coming more and more often.
“No, not deliberately. I guess it never came up. It turns out that a lot of my college friends don’t know either. It’s never seemed very important before.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier on you if they knew? You don’t like secrets, do you?”
That was certainly true. “I also don’t want to have to tell Amanda how little I’ve done on our grant application. I don’t like disappointing people.”
“You probably don’t do it very often. Tell me more about the grant. What would the money be for?”
“Partly so we would have time next summer. Developing a detailed curriculum is a lot of work, and we’ve always had to have summer jobs.”
Ben looked at her, his head tilted, his eyes glinting. “It sounds like you don’t completely realize how much money you’re going to have when the estate settles.”
That was true. She wasn’t thinking of herself as an heiress. The terms of Grannor’s will still hurt. If Colleen had been inheriting half of the jewelry and a sixth of the silver and china, she would be thinking about what she wanted. She would have tried on the pearls. She would have compared the cake forks in the different sets of sterling. But the money? Thinking about the trips she would be able to take, all the things she would be able to buy, made her feel as if she hadn’t really mattered.
“This curriculum is something I care about,” she said. “Even if we can do it without the grant, we would still have to do this preliminary work. It isn’t a waste of time.”
Ben knew a lot about how athletic kids learned. “There are kids whose teachers think that they are as dumb as a post because verbal instructions mean so little to them, but their motor memories and kinetic awareness are off the charts. They are whip smart, just not in the ways the classroom cares about.”
He went on to say that sometimes you simply had to grab hold of a kid’s shoulders or hips and have them feel what they needed to do. Words, even pictures, didn’t help them, but once they felt it, they never forgot it. “Of course, it’s a bitch because you can’t touch the kids anymore. That’s right. Of course, it is, but it disadvantages some of them so much.”
This was the real Ben, not the overly controlled, overly polite man of the last few months; this was the Ben she had once loved so dearly. Why wasn’t he trying to get back into coaching? He cared so much about how these kids learned. This was what he was supposed to be doing. That was the only way he would ever truly be himself.
* * * *
The Fourth was on a Friday. Two other of Colleen’s friends, Cara Hernandez and Libby Tyson, were coming to the lake with Jason and Amanda. They were arriving Thursday evening. From the kitchen window Colleen saw Jason’s car come up the drive. She called to Ben, and they went out the front door to greet the others.
Colleen introduced Cara and Libby to Ben. Cara almost closed her finger in the car door, and Libby tilted the plate of cookies she was carrying. Ben’s reaction time was so quick that he steadied the plate before any of the cookies fell. This didn’t add to Libby’s composure.
Amanda sent a teasing glance to Colleen. I didn’t warn them what he looks like.
In the dusky shadow cast by the sprawling house, Ben’s hair looked black, its flashes of copper needing the sun, but the perfect symmetry of his features, the easy grace of his carriage, dazzled with its own light.
It was a moment before Libby was sure enough of herself to speak. “I hope no one minds what I spent.” She loved to cook so she had taken over planning the menus and had brought a lot of the groceries with her. “Divided six ways it won’t be that bad.”
Now it was Ben’s turn to send Colleen a look, this one pleading. He did not want to go Dutch when four of the others were teachers.
She gave her head a slight shake. Her friends had come expecting to pay their own way.
Was this what it would be like when Grannor’s estate was settled? Her friends would still have to budget for every little indulgence while she could easily treat them. Wouldn’t that be awkward? Would they start to expect her to pay? Would that make her feel taken advantage of?
She supposed that there were worse problems to have.
“Amanda told us that you got the internet a few weeks ago,” Cara said as they were carrying the groceries in. “What about cable TV? I hate to sound like the low-brow ditz that I am, but I am interested in watching Autumn Chase’s show.”
This would have been a good time to tell everyone, that there was a chance, such a slight chance that it was hardly worth mentioning, that she might be Ariel. Everyone would be shocked. All the bustle of putting away the groceries would stop. They would want her to tell the whole story. They were smart, they would figure out that there was a whole lot more than just a slight chance that she was Ariel. They would want to know if she had had her DNA done, why she hadn’t said anything, she always told everyone everything, and on and on. She couldn’t face it.
So only Ben would know.
* * * *
The Fourth was everything that the holiday should be. Ben wheeled around the old Weber grill, and they grilled hot dogs and hamburgers over the charcoal. At dusk, they crowded into the rowboat and watched the village fireworks from the lake. People with homes along the shore had turned off their lights, and the music from the open-air dock in the village carried over the water.
Saturday morning Colleen sat down with Amanda to talk about the grant application. “I’m sorry. I got new ideas, some of them thanks to Ben, but I haven’t gotten much writing done. I’ve been helping my father organize my grandmother’s estate.”
“Jason and I are finding it strange to be here without her. It must be a nightmare for you. Do you still expect her to sweep in the room and tell you what you are doing wrong?”
“Actually, no.”
In the first few days after Grannor had died, before they had gone down to Georgia, Colleen had felt that her grandmother was still in the house, but once she and Ben had returned, she hadn’t. She used paper napkins and set the ketchup and mustard out in their original containers without feeling that Grannor was watching her. Her shock over the will must have stifled her grief. That probably wasn’t healthy.
“Her will caused a lot of hurt feelings,” she said to Amanda.
“Oh?”
Amanda was an English teacher; she liked stories. She would have liked to hear this one. But how could Colleen explain the will? Amanda didn’t even know that she was adopted, and with Autumn’s show coming on tonight, it was too complicated.
Amanda was also a good friend, so when Colleen murmured something about her aunt and uncle being angry, Amanda didn’t push her. “Then can we talk about Ben?” Amanda asked.
“What’s to say? We aren’t a couple. We are trying to be friends, but there is a lot of baggage.”
“You haven’t been tempted to jump his bones?”
“I certainly haven’t done it.”
* * * *
Cara and Libby were not the sort who indulged in holiday flings. They were only interested in something serious, and Colleen felt sure that Amanda had warned them that there was something complicated between Ben and herself, no matter how often she had tried to tell Amanda otherwise.
“We’re thinking of him as a museum piece,” Libby said when the four women were alone Saturday afternoon. “Look, but do not touch.”
“His mother did want him to become a priest,” Colleen said.
“A priest? A Catholic priest? As in a poverty, chastity, and obedience kind of priest?”
“Yes,” Colleen answered. “But I don’t think he would be good at any of those.”
“I’d certainly start going to mass a lot more,” said Cara. “My mother would be very pleased.”
“Especially if she started going with you,” Amanda added.
Ben as a priest…going through his day, dressed in black with a touch of white at his throat, the white calling attention to the Irish beauty of his face; celebrating mass, wearing the white vestment, lifting the chalice overhead as he consecrated the Host, his robe rippling down from his broad shoulders.
Colleen might well be in the pews too, but for all the wrong reasons.
* * * *
Finally it was eight o’clock on Saturday night. Ben and Jason moved the furniture a little so that they could all gather around the TV. In groups Colleen usually took a seat in the middle of a sofa. She was small; she didn’t feel cramped by having people on either side of her. And she liked being in the middle of things. Tonight she sat in a wing chair.
What were the next ninety minutes going to be like? Would it be like a beauty pageant? Would confetti cascade from the ceiling when the winner was announced? Would there be a tiara and flowers?
Whatever happened, it wouldn’t be Colleen who was crowned.
She knew that either she was Ariel or she wasn’t. Nothing that happened Saturday night was going to change that. But she couldn’t help feeling that by not submitting an application she had lost her chance, that someone else was going to step in the place that was rightfully hers.
People she had grown up with had been in touch with her since the search for Ariel had begun. She had always said that her father had said that it was impossible. That was the truth—he had said that—which was fortunate because she was no good at lying, but he had said it because he wanted it to be so, not because he had any evidence.
A commercial began telling them about a weight loss pill that they could order directly from the manufacturer at a one-time special savings. The next commercial was again direct-marketing, this one for a set of inspirational songs from various country artists.
“I would have expected better ads.” Jason said. “At least ones for her products.”
“This could backfire on her brand,” Ben said. “The people in charge of the merch may have dug foxholes for themselves.”
The cable channel’s logo came on the screen followed by a blandly handsome young man. “Welcome to Are You Ariel?” he said dramatically. “I am Brian Raines, and we are live!”
“Okay, Colleen, you have an October birthday,” Amanda said, “this is your last chance to pretend to be adopted.”
“What are you talking about?” Cara asked. “Are you adopted, Colleen?”
Colleen could feel Ben looking at her. No, I didn’t tell them.
So he rescued her. “I think Amanda said ‘pretend.’” His voice was deep.
“I was born in October,” she said, “but I don’t think my dad would like me to emerge as the poster child for adoption.” That was certainly true.
“We are here tonight,” the host continued, “in hopes that we can find the lost daughter of the beloved Autumn Chase. Autumn is backstage in a separate room.” The screen switched to a shot of her. Brian complimented her on how lovely she looked and asked her how she was feeling.
“I’m nervous, I’m hopeful,” she said, her hand brushing against her chest as if she were touching her heart. With her was Bethany Ares, a “celebrity journalist.”
“What’s a celebrity journalist?” Jason asked. “Does she write about celebrities, or is she a celebrity herself?”
No one in the room knew. None of them had ever heard of her.
Bethany took over the interview. At fourteen, Autumn explained, she had been the sole support of her extended family. Her parents, grandmother, and great-grandmother all lived in houses owned by the trust in which child-labor laws required her earnings to be placed. Her parents’ only source of income was the fees that they took for managing her career.
“The fees were not inappropriate, but if I wasn’t earning, they weren’t either.”
Her multi-picture contract was with a division of a squeaky-clean film corporation. The parents of her young fans would not have considered a pregnant teen to be an acceptable role model for their daughters.
“Why didn’t you have an abortion?” Bethany asked.
“My father expected me to. I couldn’t believe it.” Autumn blinked and tilted her head back as if even now she couldn’t believe it. “We were Catholics. I had grown up hearing that an abortion might sever my relationship with God. My father didn’t care about that, only about my career.”
Her mother’s continued refusal to take her in for an abortion had been the breaking point in her parents’ already difficult marriage.
“Did you want to keep the baby?” Bethany asked.
“Of course. Of course.” She leaned forward, making a despairing little gesture, her hand near her chin, her fingers flicking open, her palm turning outward. It was a familiar gesture; Colleen recognized it as characteristic of Autumn’s TV character, M.J. “But my mother wouldn’t hear of it. She told me that neither she nor my grandmother would do a thing to help me raise it, and I would need to come up with a plan not only to take care of my child, but how I was going to replace the income that I would be losing.”
“That’s a lot of pressure to put on a young girl.”
“That’s why adoption felt like the only choice. Now I need to know where Ariel is and how she is doing. I need to know if I did the right thing. I want her to understand why I did what I did; I need to know if she forgives me.”
The interviewer asked her what the search for Ariel had uncovered so far.
“Not a great deal. I was apparently admitted to the hospital under a false name and my mother destroyed all our paperwork. My grandmother was the one who contacted her parish priest, asking him to find a good Catholic family, but both of them are dead and they left no records. Even the most experienced investigators haven’t found a trace of what happened to her.”
The investigators had also examined all the registries where adoptees could express their interest in reuniting with birth families, but there had been no trace of Ariel on any of them.
“The mother searching for her child,” Amanda said, “that’s the Demeter myth, Persephone being kidnapped and taken into the underworld, and her mother plunging the world into winter while she went looking for her.”
Colleen spoke. “I don’t think adopting families would like to be compared to the underworld.”
After a commercial break, the host came back onscreen to explain the format of the show. “The production staff has screened dozens of applications—”
“Dozens?” Jason interrupted. “That’s not very impressive.”
The others shushed him.
“—and every person who had the slightest possibility of being Ariel has been investigated. Since the secrecy about Ariel’s birth was so important, we had to allow for the possibility that identifying information, including the birth date, may have been falsified. We accepted anyone with a birthday from September through January. In one case we have even been willing to entertain the possibility that Autumn was misled about the gender of the child.”
He then introduced the first candidate. She was a lovely young woman with an astonishing resemblance to Autumn Chase. She was petite with the same thick chestnut hair, the same high cheekbones and balanced jaw, the same little nose.
“She has to be Ariel,” Libby said.
“No.” Amanda was confident. “They will save the most likely candidates for last. This one has to be a total non-starter.”
Back on the screen, the candidate and Brian had moved to sit down in a pair of leather chairs. “You certainly look as if you could be Ariel.”
“Yes, as long as I can remember, people have been telling me that I look like Autumn Chase.”
“Do you think that you are Ariel?”
“No. I’m not adopted. I know I’m not. My looking like her is a fluke…although I deliberately wear my hair like she does. I figured that if it looked good on her, it would look good on me.”
“Even so,” Brian said, “the resemblance is extraordinary. Is it possible that you were switched at birth, that your parents brought the wrong baby home from the hospital?”
“Ever since this started, people have been asking me that, but I was born in December in Akron, Ohio. No one in my family has ever been near Florida.”
“If you are so confident that you are not Ariel, why did you come on the show?”
“It was a free trip to LA,” she admitted honestly. “And I’ve never been to California. But also, my family’s been getting so many questions, people accusing them of lying about my not being adopted. Someone even suggested that my parents were lying because they had taken money to pass off Autumn’s baby as theirs. My mother was really hurt. It’s been horrible having people say these things about us. Coming on the show seemed like the best way to let everyone know for sure.”
The second hopeful was a slender, young man in a remarkably tight version of an Oxford-cloth shirt. He had been a fan of Autumn Chase since he had been able to turn on the television himself. He had been adopted, and the dates weren’t too far off. He felt sure that the attraction he had always felt for Autumn must be genetic. She must be his mother.
“You do know that Autumn’s mother and grandmother have said that they each saw a baby girl?” Brian asked.
“Yes, but the hospital could have shown them the wrong baby. Or they could be lying. They’ve lied so many times. Why should we believe them about this?”
“You do have a point. How would your life change if you found out that you were Ariel?”
The young man spun out a fantasy about going places with Autumn, traveling with her. He had always been interested in fashion, and although he had had no formal training, he prided himself on his innate taste, taste that had been inherited from her, no doubt. Of course, she had professional stylists, but he could see himself supervising them.
“Can you imagine what the professionals would think about that?” Amanda asked.
The third hopeful was a ten-year-old girl whose adoptive parents had decided that she might be Autumn’s granddaughter. Her birth mother, the actual potential “Ariel,” had been sixteen. The family didn’t have her name, but knew that she liked to read books and sing in her church choir. She had a family history of elevated blood pressure similar to that of the Chases’.
“That proves nothing,” Ben said. “Every decent Southern family has hypertension all over the family tree. We live on fried food and cream gravies.”
Until the little girl turned eighteen, the parents would not be able to find out anything more about the birth mother, and admittedly, they had no reason to think that she had been adopted herself. But the father went on and on about how exceptionally talented his daughter was. If she was allowed to sing, everyone would know that she must be carrying Autumn’s DNA.
The host started to ask the girl a question. She interrupted him, not letting him finish.
“What a brat,” Libby said as soon as the commercial came on. “We have kids in the lower school like that. You always want to slap them.”
“These three do seem like long shots, don’t they?” Cara said.
“Does it matter?” Jason asked. “Isn’t this all about the publicity? Wouldn’t every forty-something actress kill for this publicity?”
“Don’t be so cynical, Jason,” Cara admonished. “We’re supposed to care about this.”
“The Nats are playing the Dodgers,” he answered. “The game’s out west. It might still be on. That’s what I care about.”
As Amanda had predicted, the producers had been saving the two most likely candidates for the end. Both were within a few months of being the right age and had been adopted by Catholic families. The first one had been raised in Alaska, one of the few states that allowed adoptees easy access to their original birth certificates once they turned eighteen. The shows’ producers helped her get hers. It had been issued in Alaska. Her mother was “Jane Doe,” her father was unknown. This level of secrecy might have been promising if the original certificate had been issued in Florida, but this candidate seemed to have been born in Alaska.
This candidate herself was the exact opposite of the annoying little girl. She was pathologically shy. She whispered monosyllabic answers and never looked at the camera or the host. It was painful to watch her. Fortunately the host treated her gently and got her off-camera quickly.
The final woman was one tough cookie. Her spiky hair was dyed a flat, lifeless black; dense, dark tattoos spiraled up her arms. Her lip was pierced, and she had a ring through her eyebrow. Colleen’s mother would have sighed and called her “hard.”
“She isn’t someone the shopping channel is going to want to be associated with,” Ben said. “From a marketing standpoint, this would be one bad outcome.”
This candidate had, indeed, been adopted by a Catholic couple—“a fine pair of Christians they were,” she scoffed—but when she was five, they had gone to court to dissolve the adoption. She had spent the rest of her childhood being moved among foster homes, finally ending up in an institutional environment.
She was so angry with her adoptive parents that she had never thought about her birth family. Now all she wanted from Autumn Chase was money. “She owes me. She abandoned me to them. You heard her. She dumped her baby to save her movie contract. It was all about money for her. I was the one who allowed her to go on making money. She owes me.”
“You are confident that you are Ariel?”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about any Ariel. I just know that someone owes me.”
“You have indeed had a difficult life,” the host said and after a few more platitudes, he cut to a commercial break.
“There’s your underworld, Amanda,” Jason said. “That girl has been in hell for most of her life, but I don’t see how much a rescue can do.”
“I guess we have to root for the one from Alaska,” Cara said.
“I don’t agree,” Ben said. “At least that last one had her anger to sustain her. Can you imagine what would happen to Miss Alaska if she got caught up in the celebrity machine? She would be roadkill.”
“Then we have to root for the guy. He wants to be caught up in the celebrity machine.”
Colleen hadn’t said anything. So this was what it meant to be on national television. Perfectly nice people like Cara and Ben felt that they had the right to call you a brat or roadkill. What would people have said about her if she had been on the show? That she was boring, overprivileged, stuck up, too eager to please? That she needed to lose ten pounds or gain five? That her earrings were all wrong? They could say anything.
The commercials ended. The first three candidates came onstage one by one. The lookalike who hadn’t been adopted, the young man, and the annoying little girl were each told that they were not Ariel.
The final two hopefuls, the shy one from Alaska and the angry one, were brought out together, standing side by side. It was indeed as if this were a beauty pageant and the two women were waiting to see which one would be first runner-up and which one the queen. When Miss Alaska was told that she was not Ariel, a look of relief flashed across her face, followed by an expression that was weary. She had failed yet again.
The tattooed one was looking grimly smug. The host repeated some of her story, dwelling on how rare, but how tragic it was when an adoption failed. “And you are…not Ariel.”
Not…Had he really said ‘not’? Colleen wasn’t sure that she had heard right, but the woman’s expression was hardening into unreadable sullenness. No confetti fell; Autumn wasn’t rushing onto the stage.
So it wasn’t over. She could still be Ariel.
“Yuck,” Libby said. “I feel as if I need to take a shower. That was horrible. Why did we watch that?”
The camera cut to Autumn. “Of course I am disappointed, and I feel so badly for some of those people.” She made the little M.J. gesture again. “But this only makes me feel more urgent about finding Ariel. What if she, too, ended up in institutional care?”
This doesn’t mean that it’s me. The real Ariel could be in the Peace Corps, serving in a village cut off from American celebrity gossip. She could not know that she was adopted. She could be dead.
Onscreen a woman from one of the radical birth-mother organizations joined Autumn and Mia, and the journalist began to question her about what else could be done to find Ariel.
“Why isn’t anyone asking about the father?” Jason said. “No one has mentioned him. Doesn’t he have a role in this?”
“Autumn won’t name him,” Cara said. “She said that he never knew that she was pregnant and that his family has a right to privacy.”
“And Ariel and her family don’t?” Ben asked.