“Who is this?”
“My name is Ayanna Lake. I’m the adoptive mother of Kayla Lake.”
The kitchen disappeared. Xander disappeared. The legal pad, the laptop, the files, the ankle monitor, all dissolved into nothing and there was just me and this woman’s voice in my ear and the sound of my own heartbeat flooding my head. I’d imagined this call a thousand times. I’d rehearsed what I’d say, how I’d sound, what words I’d choose to introduce myself to the woman who raised my daughter. I was never supposed to receive it like this. Not on house arrest. Not facing murder charges. Not nine months pregnant by a man who kidnapped me.
“Yes,” I managed. “This is Serenity.”
“I’m going to be brief because I don’t know you and I’m not interested in getting to know you right now. We received a subpoena this morning for a DNA test for my daughter in connection with a criminal case in Connecticut. My husband and I have spent twelve years raising this child. We love her. She isours. And now your situation is disrupting her life and I need you to understand how upsetting that is for our family.”
Every word was precise, measured. I could hear the anger underneath them, restrained but present, and I deserved every bit of it. This woman didn’t ask for any of this. She opened her home and her heart to a baby that I couldn’t keep and built a life around her and now my past was showing up at her door with a subpoena and a dead man’s name.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice cracked on the second word. “I never wanted this. I never wanted her involved in any of this.”
“Well, she’s involved now.” Ayanna paused. I could hear her breathing. Then her tone shifted, just slightly, just enough to tell me the next thing she said was harder for her to deliver than everything before it. “Kayla has always known she was adopted. We told her when she was young because we believed she deserved the truth. She’s never expressed interest in finding her birth parents. Until today. When we told her about the subpoena, she asked about you. She asked if she could speak with you.” Another pause. “She’s here. She wants to talk to you now.”
No. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready for this, not now, not today, not ever, really. I had fantasized about meeting Kayla for twelve years but the fantasy was always different. I was clean. I was free. I was wearing something beautiful and my hair was done and I had something to offer her besides a criminal record and an apology. I wanted to meet my daughter as someone worth knowing, not as a cautionary tale.
But I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t refuse my daughter’s voice after twelve years of silence. Even if I wasn’t ready. Even if the timing was catastrophic. Even if hearing her would break me.
“Okay,” I whispered.
There was shuffling on the other end, a muffled exchange between Ayanna and someone else, and then a new voice camethrough. She sounded young and soft and careful, like a child who knows something important is happening but hasn’t figured out exactly what.
“Hi. This is Kayla. Um… is this… are you my…”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to. Her voice hit me somewhere below my chest and above my stomach, in a place I didn’t know existed until it detonated. Twelve years of silence, grief, Friday afternoons in a cafe, withdrawal sweats in a rehab bed, promises I made to myself in the dark, all of it collapsed into the sound of a twelve-year-old girl trying to figure out what to call the woman who gave her away.
And then my body broke.
The contraction seized me so hard and so fast that the phone slipped from my hand and hit the table. It started in my back and wrapped around my entire torso and squeezed with a force that bent me forward in the chair and ripped a sound out of my throat that I didn’t recognize as my own voice. My hands grabbed the edge of the table and my knuckles went white and I heard Xander’s chair scrape back and his voice saying my name but it was distant, underwater, somewhere outside the wall of pain that had closed around me.
“Serenity. Serenity, look at me. What’s happening?” Xander was beside me, one hand on my shoulder, his face close to mine.
I couldn’t answer. Another contraction hit before the first one fully released, an excruciating wave on top of a wave, and I slid out of the chair onto my knees on the kitchen floor and grabbed Xander’s arm with both hands and squeezed until I felt his muscle compress under my fingers.
He picked up my phone from the table. “This is Xander Cross, Ms. Banks’s attorney. There’s a medical emergency and she’ll need to call you back.” He hung up before Ayanna could respond and slid the phone into his pocket and then he was on the floor next to me with his arm around my shoulders.
“Is it the baby?”
“She’s coming,” I gasped. “Xander, she’s coming now.”
He was on his feet and moving down the hallway before I finished the sentence. I heard him knock on the bedroom door and say “Rita, we need to go, the baby is coming” in a voice that was calm enough to keep an old woman from panicking but urgent enough to get her moving. Rita appeared in the hallway within seconds.
“Call her probation officer,” Rita told Xander. “Tell them we’re going to the hospital and if they have a problem with it they can arrest me.”
Xander helped me to my feet and I leaned against him and we moved toward the door. The ankle monitor blinked green against my swollen skin.
In the car, somewhere between the apartment and the hospital, between contractions that were coming faster now and closer together, I realized two things at the same time. My second child was about to be born. And my first child’s very first interaction with her birth mother was three seconds of silence followed by a scream of agony before the phone went dead.
That was what Kayla heard. That was what she’d carry. And I couldn’t fix it because I was bent double in the backseat of Xander’s car screaming into my own hands while Rita held my head and told me to breathe and the world narrowed to nothing but pain and motion and the unbearable weight of being two kinds of mother at the same time.
20
Justice
Beatriz cleared out overnight and by six in the morning the sky over Caracas was blue and calm like the last two days never happened. Diego had the boat ready before we pulled up to the marina. It was a forty-foot yacht, twin engines, covered wheelhouse, and enough fuel to run the Grenadines for three days without stopping. Diego’s man Tomás was already on board, a quiet Venezuelan nigga who chain-smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and minded his business. I liked him immediately. We didn’t need conversation. We needed a driver.
I’d spent the night studying charts and current patterns while Prime and Bryce slept. The raft we spotted from the plane had been drifting south toward Bonaire. The currents in this part of the Caribbean push west and south, which meant wherever that raft started was north and east of where we found it. I traced the drift back and the math kept landing in the same area, the southern Grenadines. Small islands and cays scattered between Grenada and St. Vincent, most of them uninhabited, surrounded by shallow reefs and open water. If Quest ditched the plane and paddled toward the nearest land, one of those islands is where he ended up.
