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more scared than I’d been for the past few hours.
    The woman regarded me silently for a few seconds. She chose to answer only one of my questions.
    “I,” she said, “am your Aunt Memory.”

Nine
    T HE WOMAN SPOKE THOSE WORDS —“I AM YOUR A UNT M EMORY ”—the way someone might say,
I am the president of the United States
or
I am the queen of England
. She clearly expected me to understand immediately maybe even to curtsy or bow.
    When I did none of those, only stared blankly the woman gasped.
    “She didn’t explain?” the woman asked incredulously. “She never told you?”
    “Who? Told me what?” I asked. Some calm, reasonable part of my mind was thinking,
Pick up the phone again and call the police! Now you have a reason!
But I hesitated, studying the woman. She had dark hair, pulled back from her face. She wore a long, flowing dark coat, of some sort of wool, too heavy for April. I judged her to be in her thirties or forties. About my mom’s age, maybe older. She didn’t seem to be a threat. She wasn’t aiming a gun or a knife at me.
    She seemed more like a clue. A better one than a key or a scrap of paper.
    “You mean my mom,” I said. “You mean my mom never explained.”
    “I mean Sophia,” the woman said. And in her pronunciation of my mom’s name I heard the same, faint accent my mom had. An accent I’d been hearing my whole life without knowing it.
    “Then you explain,” I said, and was instantly amazed by my own boldness.
    “There is no time now,” the woman said, glancing impatiently over her shoulder. “You must come with me.”
    This had gone too far. I placed my hand back on the phone, ready to knock the receiver off the hook. I could punch in 9-1-1 without looking, behind my back. I would, if the woman so much as took one step in my direction.
    But what if the police came before I got any answers?
    “I can’t go anywhere right now,” I said cautiously. “I’m waiting for my mom to come home.”
    The woman gave me the kind of pitying look our teachers give the stupidest kids at school. Part
I don’t have time for this right now
, part
I can’t believe how dumb you are
, and part
I feel really, really sorry for you, not being able to do any better than that. What will ever become of you?
It made me feel about three years old and dumber than a dog.
    “Sophia,” the woman said, “is not your mother!”
    I could see her mouth moving, but I’m not sure I heard her words. Rather, I felt them, deep in my heart, deep in my brain.
    I waited for the jolt of shock. It didn’t come. Somehow I had known this—for how long? Since my hypnotized memory of escaping with “Mama,” at least. But probably longer than that. I called my mother “Mom.” I put her name down on all thoseforms we had to fill out for school. I’d given her a Mother’s Day card every year. I loved her, I guess. But there had always been something at the back of my mind, I thought now, some inkling that went beyond wanting my mother to be more like my friends’ mothers.
    “Why did she say she was?” I asked weakly. My grip on the phone slipped. It didn’t matter.
    The woman shrugged. She was watching me carefully.
    “She kidnapped you,” the woman said. Her accent seemed even more pronounced suddenly. “Do not judge her too harshly. I believe she thought she was protecting you. Crythe then was … dangerous.”
    “Crythe?” I asked numbly.
    The woman no longer seemed surprised by my ignorance.
    “Crythe,” she repeated. “Your home. Where Sophia is imprisoned now. She has been kidnapped now too. You must come and save her!”

Ten
    L ATER I WOULD WONDER WHY I BELIEVED HER SO QUICKLY . I WASN’T stupid. I wasn’t naive. I’d heard the same “stranger danger” lectures everyone gets, from preschool on up. I wasn’t sure I trusted this woman. But she claimed to be my Aunt Memory, whatever that meant, and memory was exactly what I was starved for.
    Plus, she seemed so sure that I would