Chapter 4

It was the woman who had taught her how to pray.

Rhonda said it out loud, alone in the dark.

Then she got dressed.

At five she drove out to County Road 9.

The house sat behind the fence her father built.

Her mother was on the porch with her coffee.

Verna Tillis. Sixty-eight. Gray braid. Church cardigan.

"Morning," Verna said.

"You're up early."

Rhonda put the papers on the porch table.

Verna looked at them and didn't touch them.

"I don't know what that is," she said.

"You know exactly what that is."

"Where did you get it?"

"Out of a drawer at the Dorsey ranch."

Verna's face didn't change.

That was the worst part.

No surprise.

No shame.

Rhonda pointed at the line.

"You wrote my name on a death certificate."

"I did it for you," Verna said.

"Don't," Rhonda said.

"Don't say that to me."

"Then I'll say it plain."

"You were twenty-one and there was no man."

"This town would have eaten you alive."

"Twenty-three years, and this town never knew a thing."

"There was money in it, too," Rhonda said.

Verna didn't answer.

"The Dorseys paid forty thousand dollars," she said finally.

"The Suttons paid twenty-five."

"You sold them."

"I settled them."

"There's a difference."

Rhonda's hands went cold.

"That money built this house," Verna said.

"Paid off the truck."

"Your daddy's headstone came out of it."

Rhonda looked at the house.

At the porch.

At the truck in the drive.

"You put my son in a headstone," she said.

Verna finally looked away.

"Where is he?"

"Missouri."

"A family named Sutton. A farm outside Springfield."

"And the girl?"

"Everybody in Fort Worth knew the Dorseys."

"Old money. No children."

"They'd been trying for years."

Rhonda gripped the porch rail.

"You picked them like cattle."

"I vetted them," Verna said.

"I made sure they were good people."

She straightened her cardigan.

"I gave that boy a father with a truck and a mother who taught Sunday school."

"I gave that girl a name and a horse."

"I gave you your life back."

Rhonda stood there a long minute.

She did not yell.

She had wanted to, all night.

But the woman on the porch wasn't worth the sound.

"I'm not going to forgive you today," Rhonda said.

"Or Sunday."

"I don't expect it."

"Good."

Rhonda gathered the papers.

"I'm going to find my son," she said.

"Then I'm coming back with a lawyer."

She closed the porch gate behind her.

Then she closed the screen door quiet, like a woman leaving a church.

She was on the highway when her phone rang.

Mack, at eight in the morning.

"I went back through her desk last night," Mack said.

"The folder had more in it than I told you."

Rhonda pulled onto the shoulder.

"More how?"

"There's a picture."

"Of who?"

"A girl. About twenty-one."

"Brown hair. Freckles. Tired eyes."

Rhonda closed her eyes.

"There's writing on the back."

"In her handwriting."

"Read it to me."

Mack read it.

"Birth mother - deceased."

The line went quiet.

"She had your picture in her desk," Mack said.

"For twenty-three years."

Rhonda sat on the shoulder with the engine running.

Then Mack said the rest.

"I showed it to her this morning."

"She didn't ask who you were."

"She just sat down and closed the door."

"She said she's looked at that picture more times than she should have."

"She said she knew your face the second you walked up the lawn."

"Before the mark. Before the bracelet."

Rhonda held the phone so hard it creaked.

Delia Dorsey had looked at her face twenty-three years ago in a photograph.

She had looked at it again tonight across a table of champagne.

And she had called her a scam.