Magic Hour

“No. She’ll be back.”

“Home Girl?”

“Yes.” He tucked a straggly, still damp lock of hair behind her tiny ear.

“Wolf?” Her mouth trembled. The question was so big and complex; yet she asked it all with that one word.

“The wolf is okay, too.”

She shook her head, and suddenly she appeared too old for her face, too knowing. “No. Trap. Bad.”

“He needs to be free,” Max said, understanding her easily.

“Like birds.”

“You know about trapped, don’t you?” He stared down into her small, heart-shaped face. As much as he wanted to look away—needed to look away—he couldn’t. She made him remember too many moments that had passed. The surprising thing was, they were good memories, some of them. From a time when he’d been able to stand still . . . a time when holding a child had made him laugh instead of cry.

“Read Girl?” She pointed to a book on the coffee table. It was already open to a page.

He picked it up.

She immediately resettled herself so that she was positioned closely beside him.

He looped one arm around her and opened the book between them.

She pointed to the top of the page, very certain where she’d left off.

He began to read: “‘Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the skin horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’”

Read to me, Daddy.

He felt Alice’s hand on his cheek, comforting him. Only then did he realize that he was crying.

“Ouch,” she said.

He looked down at her, trying to

remember the last time he’d let himself cry.

“All better?”

He tried to smile. “All better.”

Smiling at that, she snuggled up against him. He closed the book and started telling her another story, one he’d spent a long time trying to forget, but some words stayed with you. It felt good, saying it all to someone, even if, by the time he got to the sad part, the part that made him want to cry again, she was fast asleep.

TWENTY-TWO

THE DNA IS CONCLUSIVE?” JULIA ASKED. IN THE QUIET OF THE car her voice sounded louder than she would have liked. Because of the snow and the falling night, it felt as if they were cocooned in some strange spaceship.

“I’m no expert,” Ellie said, “but the lab report indicated certainty. And he knew about the birthmark. I have a call into the FBI. We’ll know more in the morning. But . . .”

“What’s her real name?”

“Brittany.”

“Brittany.” Julia tested out the name, trying to make a match in her mind. She thought that if she focused on little things like that—tasks—she wouldn’t think of the big things. Alice—Brittany—wasn’t her daughter; she never had been. All along, the A answer had been this moment—Alice’s reunification with her real family. It didn’t matter that she had made a fatal mistake and fallen in love with the child. What mattered was Alice. That was the ledge Julia clung to. “Why did it take him so long to get here?”

Ellie pulled into the parking slot marked CHIEF OF POLICE and parked.