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“Meaning you keep people close when you need them quiet.” Cooper shrugged. “I’m not saying that’s what it was. I’m saying it plays.”

Sam turned to Zack.

“You were seven,” he said. “In ninety-six. He used to take you into the office on Saturdays.”

“He took me a lot of places.”

“Do you remember her pregnant?”

Zack didn’t answer right away, which was the thing Sam had always trusted about him. He turned the question over first. He was careful and deliberate.

“I don’t remember a pregnancy specifically. There was a stretch where she wasn’t there.” Zack looked at the middle of the table, working at it. “A different lady was at the desk. Older. Gray hair, I think. And I remember being annoyed about it, because Leigh kept butterscotch candies in the second drawer and she’d let me take two, and the new lady wouldn’t give me any. I asked, and she said no.”

“I remember that,” Cooper said, nodding in agreement. “I remember that she didn’t have much patience for us, not like Leigh did.”

“I complained to Mom in the car,” Zack said. “I remember that. I complained the whole way home about the candy.”

“How long?” Frankie asked.

“I don’t know. I was seven. It felt like forever, but everything did.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I never once wondered where she went.”

It was Tate who asked the real question, which was also the thing about Tate. He waited until the noise died down and then he put it on the table.

“So where’s the baby?”

The room went quiet in a different way than before. This was a silence full of questions and unknown answers.

“Alli thought it might not have lived,” Sam said. “She said it gently, but she said it. A woman keeps footprints and a lock of hair and a bracelet in a box in a drawer, and there’s no child anywhere in that condo. No pictures on the walls. Nothing.”

“Maybe,” Cooper said.

Everyone looked at him. He leaned against the credenza with his arms folded, wearing the expression he got when something stopped being a conversation and started being a problem.

“Maybe?” Piper asked. “Can you expand on that? Or are you trying to be mysterious today?”

“Maybe the baby died, maybe it didn’t. I write this for a living, so let me be useful for once.” He straightened up. “Think about what she hid. She hid the whole thing. Nobody in this building knew, nobody in this family knew, and this town cannot keep a secret about a haircut. Thirty years she carried it.”

“So?”

“Here’s the thing… how do you hide a funeral?”

“Jesus, Cooper,” Frankie said.

“Maybe there wasn’t a funeral,” Tate said slowly. “Maybe the funeral was held someplace else. Or maybe the baby lived and is out there somewhere. We don’t know, do we? But if there’s a chance that we have a sister, I want to find her.”

“There could be a person out there who is thirty years old right now, walking around, and she might be ours.” Piper’s voice cracked on the last word. “We found out about Sarah after she was dead. We never got to say one word to her. I am not doing that twice.”

“Then we find out,” Zack said. “Quietly. We find out whether that child lived, and if she did, whether she’s a Winslow. But we do it quietly. Let’s see if we can stay off this town’s radar while we do it.”

“Quietly,” Sam agreed.

“And Dad?” Tate asked.

“Dad and I are going to have a conversation,” Sam replied.

“Oh good,” Cooper said. “Can I come?”

“If you feel the need,” Sam agreed. “But you just seem to antagonize him, and I’m going to need him to be somewhat cooperative.”