Page 112 of Secrets Hidden In The Glass

Chapter Twenty

Callie leaned back against Nate’s chest as she snuggled with him in the firelight. They’d been home for a couple of hours, neither one of them saying much while they stared at the logs snapping and popping in the fireplace. When they walked through the front door, they’d found a bag Molly had left for them on the kitchen table—soup and salad for an easy dinner. She’d tried eating, but mostly she’d picked at her meal until Nate had taken her hand and walked with her into the living room. He’d wrapped her up in his embrace on the couch and covered them with the throw he kept handy on the cushions.

Nate pulled her closer, nuzzling his cheek against hers. “What’s going on inside that head of yours?”

She slid her palms along his forearms, stopping at his wrists and giving a gentle squeeze. “I don’t know what to do—what to think or feel. You showed me pictures and documents—all the proof I could possibly need to know that this is real—but I still can’t seem to believe it.”

“Of course you can’t. This is a huge bombshell.” He kissed her temple. “I’m struggling with it myself.”

She turned her head to look at him. “What am I going to do?”

“We’re going to take a few hours to let this sink in—or days or weeks or months. However long you need. Then we’re going to figure out what you want to do with the information you’ve just learned.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Do you want to find her?”

She swallowed as the idea brought her more fear than anything else. “I don’t know. I’ve always fantasized myself meeting her—realizing that we have some sort of deep bond despite our years apart and finding out why she did what she did. But now that the possibility’s real…I don’t know,” she repeated.

“When you do, we’ll take the next step or we’ll let things go for now.”

She adjusted herself on the cushions so she sat with her legs crisscrossed, facing him. “What would the next step be?”

He sighed. “There are a couple of things we can do.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Like?”

“Well, we can contact the Hartford Police Department and see if we can get access to your files. Your case is long cold, but I could ask as a professional courtesy and pick up on any old leads—see if we can track her down.”

Callie nodded, not so sure how much she liked option number one. The fewer people who knew her connection to the abandoned child in Connecticut, the better. “What else?”

“We can leave Hartford PD out of the whole thing, and I can see what I can find on my own. I swung by the library earlier this afternoon and searched through the stacks of pictures you were looking through yesterday.”

“Did you see anything?”

He shook his head.

“What were you looking for?”

“I want a timeline—to confirm the date of the picture. There are several Fourth of July shots among the piles, but we can’t be sure they’re all from the same year.”

She frowned again. “But we know I’m the little girl.”

He nodded. “That’s true, but what if you came to the island every year? What if the photo’s from ’94 instead of ’95? It’s highly unlikely, but what if it is? Currently, we need to answer two questions: who is your biological mother, and were you on Carter Island hours before the waitress found you in Hartford, Connecticut?”

Callie nodded, following his logic. “If the picture’s from 1994, it won’t help us with the second question.”

“Exactly. Plus, if you decide you want to track her down, we’re going to be asking people to remember back a long way. We’ll want to give them as much help as we can—be as specific as we can.”

“Do you think I could have lived here?”

“No. Or I’m mostly certain you didn’t. I was pretty young myself, so I don’t remember who was living on the island and who wasn’t, but I’m planning on asking around.”

She gripped her fingers in her lap with the new wave of nerves. “I don’t want anyone to know that I’m her—Little Girl Lost.”

He hooked his hands beneath her knees and pulled her closer. “They don’t have to.”

“It’s just—I have a normal life here. No one cares that I’m ‘famous.’” She tossed up air quotes as she rolled her eyes.