Peggy tore open the envelope and removed the single sheet of paper. She scanned the page, then looked up at Caroline, her eyes filling with tears.
Caroline felt her entire body go numb. She knew that if the reporters waiting outside could see her right now, they would undoubtedly describe a seemingly calm, self-possessed woman with impeccable posture and an expressionless demeanor instead of a woman on the verge of total collapse, her stiffness the result of every fiber in her being struggling to keep her upright and in one piece. They wouldn’t understand that if she were to release the breath she was holding tight inside her lungs it would rush out of her like air from a balloon, and she would twist violently off into space, gutted and empty.
She glanced from Peggy to Hunter to Michelle to the young girl who might or might not be Samantha. Ever since Lili’s first phone call, Caroline had been cautioning herself not to get emotionally invested. She’d warned herself against letting her desire get the better of her common sense. But all that resolve had gone out the window the moment Lili appeared on her doorstep, and it had vanished altogether over the course of the last few days. Facts might be facts, but one of those facts was that she’d fallen in love. Emotions had firmly trumped common sense. One and one no longer made two. Even if the DNA tests proved conclusively that Lili was not her daughter, Caroline wasn’t sure she could survive her loss.
So she stood silent, her body rigid and ramrod straight, her face a placid mask, waiting for Peggy to speak.
They were sitting on her bed, wrapped in each other’s arms, watching the eleven o’clock news and trying to come to terms with everything that had happened since Peggy had torn open that sealed white envelope and changed their lives forever.
“Oh, God,” Peggy had said, her eyes shooting from Caroline to Lili and then back to Caroline.
“What? Tell me.”
“She’s yours. She’s Samantha.”
What followed was a chorus of gasps, as tears of relief mixed with cries of disbelief. Shocked voices overlapped; bodies swayed, rocked, clung together, before ultimately collapsing under the sheer weight of those four words.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Is it really true?”
“Let me see that.”
“It can’t be. There must be some mistake.”
“It’s here in black and white. Look for yourselves. There’s no doubt.”
“Oh, my God.”
“It’s you. It’s really you.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
“Are you absolutely positive?”
“My baby. My beautiful baby.”
And then the voice of reality. As usual, Michelle’s: “What do we do now?”
They’d called the police. The police promptly notified the FBI. They’d all come running, their arrival triggering a frenzy among the reporters still gathered outside.
“My name is Greg Fisher. I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the agent had informed the assembled media, standing outside Caroline’s front door several hours later. “There has been a new development in the case of missing child Samantha Shipley. Please bear with us. We’ll be holding a press conference at noon tomorrow. In the meantime, we ask that the family’s privacy be respected.”
Caroline had relayed to the authorities the events of the last several weeks—that she’d received a phone call from a girl calling herself Lili who lived in Calgary with her widowed mother and two younger brothers, that Lili harbored suspicions that she was really Samantha, that a dubious Caroline had flown to Calgary to meet her but Lili had failed to show, that last week she’d turned up on Caroline’s doorstep, that they’d gone for DNA testing, that Beth Hollister had flown in from Calgary yesterday to take Lili home but Lili had refused to go and Beth had returned to Canada alone, that the tests had provided proof positive that Lili was indeed Samantha, the daughter who’d been stolen from her crib in Mexico some fifteen years earlier.
“She’s yours,” Peggy had said. “She’s Samantha.”
She’s mine, Caroline had been repeating silently all day. She’s really mine.
The FBI verified the results with the lab, then notified the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP had, in turn, informed the Calgary police, who’d quickly arrested Beth Hollister and brought her in for questioning.
She’d been protesting her innocence ever since, even when confronted by the young girl she’d insisted so vehemently was hers. Caroline was still replaying their conversation in her head hours after the fact.
“How could you?” Lili had demanded of Beth when Greg Fisher finally allowed them to speak, their conversation relayed over speakerphone in her kitchen for Caroline, Hunter, and Michelle to hear.
“I didn’t know. I swear,” Beth replied tearfully.
“You swore you were my mother,” Lili reminded her.
“I am your mother.”