I don’t even know you, she said quietly. I sit at this table with you every Saturday and I don’t know one real thing about you. She looked up. Who is Avery Jane?
Jude went completely still. She watched him try. She saw his mouth open. She saw nothing come out. He picked up his keys. He walked to the door. So that was it. Hadley thought. Somebody he went home to. Somebody he kept on a shelf behind a stack of reports. a whole life she’d never been allowed near.
“Every time you’re near me, somebody’s watching,” she said to his back. “Please don’t come back.”
He paused with his hand on the door knob. Then he left.
“Varner renewal,” she said. “You want to cancel it, I assume. Extended 60 days, same terms, change nothing.”
Lorna stared at him. After what that man did, 11 people work for him, Jude said. They didn’t do anything.
He signed. He didn’t call Hadley. He didn’t drive past her house. It was the hardest thing he had done in 4 years.
On Thursday, the director of May’s daycare asked Hadley to step into her office. “The state called,” she said gently. “Routine questions,” they told me. She didn’t quite meet Hadley’s eyes. I’m sure it’s nothing.
Hadley smiled and said, “Thank you.” She made it all the way to the bus stop before she had to sit down.
On Friday, she went back to Break Bill Jewelers to return the tweezers Arlo had lent her. The old man looked over his half moon glasses. “I’m going to need somebody at this counter,” he said. “Somebody with hands like yours. One question I ask everybody. Anything open with the law or the state?”
Hadley could have lied. Nobody would have known. “Yes, sir. DCS. It isn’t true. But it’s open.”
Arlo took off his glasses. “Then I can’t, honey. Not till it’s it’s settled. I’m sorry.”
She understood. That was the worst part.
That night, she sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets, the same place she’d sat on Christmas Day. Two envelopes on the table above her. Rent, daycare. She could pay one.
At 11:58, headlights swept across the plastic on the front window. A car door shut. Footsteps on the porch. Hadley’s heart slammed. She grabbed her phone and went to the door without turning on the light. Through the glass, she saw a heavy coat, a gray braid, a face she knew, Darla Haskins. Behind her, in the backseat of an old Buick, a little boy was asleep against the window.
Hadley opened the door. Darla’s eyes were red. Her hands were twisting the strap of her purse. “Gil didn’t find you on that tape, honey,” she said. “I’m the reason he knew it was you.”
Darla sat at the kitchen table with her coat still on and told it all. For 2 years, she had brought her grandson to work. Tucker’s mother worked nights at a nursing home in halls. There was nobody else. Darla hid him in a second floor supply closet with a sleeping bag.
“On Christmas Eve, Gil watched that tape and called me,” she said. “Asked whose baby it was. I knew if he started digging, he’d find Tucker.” Her voice cracked. “So, I gave him your name. I told him you were inside the office,” Darla said. “I told him you were checking on that baby every few seconds.” He knew she wasn’t sitting out there by herself.
