Heather(47)

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At home Callie starts to make dinner—a grilled cheese and a can of tomato soup heated up on her hot plate—when her phone rings.

Healy.

“Please tell me you have a match for me,” she says, dumping the soup into a pot, splattering some of it on the front of her shirt.

“Where are you right now? Is it a good time to talk?”

“Why do you sound like you’re about to tell me someone died?” She instantly regrets her phrasing. Isn’t that what a part of her has been waiting for, dreading, since Jenna’s bag was turned in? “I’m at home, if that’s what you mean.”

“We do have a match on the Baby Doe case.”

“Hell yes.” Callie feels herself stand straighter, all of her muscles and ligaments going taut with anticipation. Fauver, she thinks. If she can get him on the DNA, then maybe she can get a warrant to search his place.

“Hauser. I don’t know how to tell you this.”

“Just tell me. This is good news, isn’t it? It’s the first real evidence in this case in thirty years.”

“We have a match. A half sibling of Baby Doe. I didn’t believe it at first. Like wondered if you were playing some kind of joke here or something—”

Callie’s excitement shifts into annoyance quickly. “You’re killing me, Healy. Enough with the suspense, please. Who is it?”

He exhales through the line. “You, Hauser. The match we have for Baby Doe? It’s you.”

Callie stands still, at first convinced she heard him wrong. The soup starts to boil but she doesn’t move to turn down the heat, just listens to it bubble angrily.

“Callie?” He says, and that’s how she knows he’s not messing with her, how she knows she heard it right the first time. Her first name, tender and tentative.

Still, she doesn’t answer him right away.

She closes her eyes and counts back the years. The DNA test she submitted, tipsy and bored on a Friday after her last attempt at Thanksgiving with Jenna. 2017. The tube she spat in and then forgot about until the email came six weeks later heralding her results. Nothing but a few distant relatives whom she had to pay a higher membership fee to view or message. Everything else, she already knew. She was predisposed to think cilantro tasted like soap. She can’t roll her tongue. Nothing about the father Jenna claimed had been a one-night stand before he moved out West to be a roadie for Pearl Jam—a story that always seemed provisional, sure, but Callie figured it was because Jenna was embarrassed about who Callie’s father was, or wasn’t exactly sure. And that had been that. Or so she thought.

And suddenly, the mysteries of the past few months resolve into meaning. This must be why Jenna ran. Why she picked up the drugs. She knew Callie would look into the case. Knew that she would be exposed as the mother of Baby Doe. But how? How did Frank bring Jenna into the station for questioning without realizing? Could he have been so oblivious? Or was it willful? A form of mercy? Why had Sabrina Riley’s name been in the mix? Was it just coincidence that her bracelet was found nearby?

She aches in a new way for sixteen-year-old Jenna, who, in her statement, claims she ran back to her house as quickly as she could after finding the child so she could call the police. Maybe she always knew she would be found out. Maybe she had wanted to be punished back then. Maybe she’s spent the rest of her life crushed under the guilt that was never, for whatever reason, discovered. Jenna abandoned Baby Doe.

Callie fumbles to explain all this to Healy. “My mother gave a statement. She said she found the baby. She said—”

He cuts her off. “Listen to me. I don’t know anything about your mother. You’re related on the father’s side.”

“What?”

“You are a genetic relative on the paternal side. There’s no match linking anyone to the child’s mother, or anyone she’s related to.”

Healy gives her a moment to process, and when he speaks again his voice is softer, padded with pity. “You really didn’t have any clue?”

A chill moves through her. Her father. A figure she can’t picture more than the avatar in one of those profiles online. A shadow, a generic outline of a man.

And Baby Doe. A half sibling. Someone else in this world who might have stood alongside her. Might have helped edge away the loneliness and shame of her girlhood. Someone else who, like Jane, could have said, I’m here.

The soup is burning on the hot plate. And still, Callie can’t move to turn the heat down.

She forces herself to ask, “Can you see who the father is? I never knew him. My mother … my mother never even told me his name.”

“You’re the closest genetic match we’ve got. Listen, I know this will be sensitive to bring up with your mom but—”

“My mother is missing. She’s an alcoholic. And an addict, apparently. And she disappeared a few days after the last time I saw her.”

Healy says something on the other side of the line but Callie doesn’t hear, can’t take in anything else. She tells Healy she will have to call him back tomorrow, unplugs the hot plate, and walks outside into the bracing night air.

She needs to move, to work off some of this unruly energy prickling along her nerves. She paces around the outside of her cabin once, twice, then walks down to the shore of the lake, crouches into a squat, drops her head into her hands.