The Stillwater Girls(59)

“Who else knows about this?” I ask, lifting trembling fingers to my lips as our eyes hold. I never knew it was possible to feel guilt and shame over something I have no recollection of doing.

“Everyone, Nic. Everyone knows. We reported her missing,” he says. “Your parents came immediately. Cate took the next flight out. The whole town was turned upside down, everyone looking for her.”

I’m going to be sick.

All these years, I haven’t just been an outsider—I’ve been the crazy lady who gave her newborn infant to a stranger and carried on like nothing happened.

No wonder they stare.

No wonder they want nothing to do with me.

No wonder I made that woman at the grocery store uncomfortable just by looking at her child.

I’m a monster.

“How could I have done something like this?” I ask. My chest is on fire, my stomach in knots. I don’t want to believe this, but while my mind still refuses to remember, my gut tells me Brant speaks the truth. I see it in his eyes. I feel it in the gravity of his words and the invisible heaviness that lingers in the space between us.

“The doctors diagnosed you with postpartum psychosis,” he says, “and that, coupled with the traumatic delivery, the stress to your body, the hormonal imbalance from the birth and the hysterectomy . . . and once you realized what you’d done with Hannah . . . you snapped, Nic. We had you committed at the advice of Dr. Dewdney, and you went voluntarily. You were an inpatient for six weeks while they adjusted your meds until you finally stopped hearing voices. But when you came home, you had no recollection of anything that happened as it pertained to the baby. The doctor said you had dissociative amnesia. It happens when we’ve been through traumatic events or when we’ve gone through something overwhelmingly stressful or emotionally painful. He said your mind blocked it out as a coping mechanism. That had a lot to do with why we weren’t in a hurry to remind you of what you’d just been through.”

It makes sense, then, that he was overly concerned with my staying in New York for the winter—I bet he’s lived in silent fear of me having an episode or a breakdown for the past ten years. It was never about the winter blues, always about what had transpired that unusually warm week in December.

“Why didn’t they put me behind bars?” I ask. “It has to be some kind of crime to just give your baby away like that.”

“You were sick, Nicolette,” he says, taking my hands in his. “And that woman, the one who took the baby? She’s the criminal here. Not you. She should have called for help. Instead, she took advantage of your situation and stole our child.”

My lips tremble. “How could you stand by me after what I did?”

I stare into the sea-green gaze of a man who’s held on to an ocean of secrets so turbulent they could have drowned him. It must have pained him to see me carrying on, no recollection whatsoever, while he lived with knowing every last detail of what went down.

If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.

“It wasn’t always easy,” he says. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you that it was. To share everything with you . . . except that? My God, Nicolette, it killed me. But I was willing to live with the pain so you didn’t have to. You’d already been through so much. No sense in both of us suffering.

“I love you more than you could ever know, my darling.” He buries his face in my lap, a moving sight, and I place my hand on the back of his head, twisting his sandy hair between my fingers before sliding my palm to the side of his face. “Can you forgive me?”

When he glances up, our eyes lock.

“We have to find her.” My words quiet to a whisper. Forgiveness is irrelevant. If what he’s saying is the truth, he did nothing wrong. The only thing he’s guilty of is protecting me from myself.

“All this time, I had no idea if she was still alive. After the leads cooled and the police stopped looking and the FBI agents went back to their posts, Beth would call with updates when she had any. Over the years those calls were fewer and farther between. But two months ago, someone mailed me this picture.” Reaching into his wallet, he produces the photo I’d found in his sock drawer. “The age matched up. She looks just like us, Nic. And she’s got your same lips, your chin, even your ears. And those eyes? Those are my eyes.”

I study the photo, almost as though I’m looking at it for the first time all over again.

And I see it now.

In fact, I’m not sure how I couldn’t see it before.

She’s just as much me as she is him.

“First came the picture,” he says. “Then requests for money. They were extorting me, threatening to remind you about Hannah and about your role in her disappearance—and I wanted to be the one to tell you, Nic. I didn’t want you to find out this way. I didn’t know if it might . . . set you off again.”

“So that’s why you were taking money from my trust?”

“They said if I paid them, they’d give us Hannah, but then they kept asking for more, dragging it out. At one point Beth wanted to stop because she thought we were being conned, but I refused. I kept looking at that picture, and I knew, Nic. I knew she was ours. And I knew whoever was behind this had to be from the area, had to be someone who knows us. Someone who knows what happened nine years ago and how we’ve dealt with it.”