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of the law Joe would end up on.
    “Police business?” she asked as he ended the call.
    “A teenage girl has gone missing; there’s a chance she’s run away.”
    “How old is she?”
    “Eighteen,” he said as he stood up. “Annie had a baby a few days ago. She doesn’t have family, so she’s been staying with Charlotte Adams and her mother the past few months.”
    “That was Charlotte on the phone?”
    “Yes. I won’t be gone long. Will you be okay here alone?”
    “I’ll be fine, Joe. Do what you have to do.” She paused. “You and Charlotte are pretty close, aren’t you?”
    “We’re friends,” he said with a warning gleam in his eyes. “Don’t make assumptions, Izzy. You don’t know anything about my life. And whatever Rachel told you isn’t the whole story.”
    A dozen reasons to explain why Annie hadn’t returned home ran around Charlotte’s head. She couldn’t believe that Annie would run away, nor could she imagine a darker alternative. She needed Joe to help her make sense of things and, more important, to find Annie.
    As the baby cried louder, Charlotte paced around the living room, trying to find a rhythm to soothe his frustrated screams. He’d been fed, changed, and examined for any sign of a physical ailment. He was just very unhappy, and she had no idea why. She was used to delivering babies, not taking care of them. This was completely new territory.
    “I’ll take him,” Monica Adams said, weary lines in her face, as she came into the room. “I can’t stand it a second more. I know what to do.”
    Charlotte heard the unspoken
you don’t,
but this wasn’t the time for an argument. They were both tired and worried. She handed the baby to her mother and sat down on the couch with a sigh.
    “I wish we had a name to call him,” Monica said as she put the baby on her shoulder and patted his back.
    “Annie thought it would be too difficult to give him up if she gave him a name.”
    Her mother’s lips tightened, and there was a fire in her eyes when she said, “Annie is being completely irresponsible. I didn’t expect this from her. She knows how lucky she is to have us, and she’s always been appreciative and thankful. How could she do this to us?”
    It was the first time her mother had criticized Annie in the six months they’d all been living together. The two of them had gotten along so well it had made Charlotte wonder why Annie could get along better with her mother than she could. But then, Annie had never tested her mother’s authority until now. Charlotte had spent most of her life butting up against her mother’s opinions and rules. And the real break in their mother-daughter tie had come a long time ago . . . with another baby and another teenager.
    She’d been seventeen and a senior in high school when she’d had to tell her mother that she was pregnant. There had been disappointment and anger in her eyes, cruelty in her mother’s words and in her actions. Charlotte had shamed the family. Her father was a minister. He preached abstinence and responsibility, and she had fallen short on both. But it wasn’t her father with whom she’d shared the secret, and her relationship with her mother had never recovered. There were still secrets and lies between them. They hadn’t talked about that horrible time in more than fifteen years, but it was always there in the background, making any hope of a closer relationship impossible.
    “It’s okay; you’re fine. Sleep now,” Monica murmured, her voice soft and tender when she spoke to the baby.
    Her mother had lost weight. Not that she’d ever been heavy; she was far too controlling to overeat or overindulge in anything. But she seemed more fragile now, more vulnerable, which seemed unthinkable. Monica Adams had always been a force of nature, powerful, opinionated, and invincible in Charlotte’s mind. Her mother had played the role of minister’s wife to perfection, tending to the physical and emotional needs of