A note, written on the back of an old envelope with the address torn off, was stuffed in a pocket of the jacket.
Carrie,
His name is Sam. I hope you’ll let him keep it.
We were supposed to meet so I could give him to you. That’s what I meant by what I said before. You’ve been wanting a baby—and you got one. I’ve been wanting a solution, and you were it for me. This was meant to be. That man I knew was right. I always knew he was special. My Sam is all yours now. And don’t worry. I won’t change my mind about this.
Ever.
The note was unsigned. Carrie folded it and tucked it into her jeans pocket.
Then, snuggling the baby close to her chest, she walked back to her car. She looked up and down the deserted stretch of pavement, but she didn’t see any sign of the girl or her car. No headlights approached, announcing that the new mother had come to her senses.
And then she looked up at the sky, silently asking the stars overhead what she was supposed to do next. As she stood there in the night, a star shot in an arcing path right over her head.
Like an answer. Like a wish.
He cried softly, and Carrie stared down into the open, unfocused blue, blue eyes of a newborn baby boy. She smiled.
“Hi, Sam,” she said softly. “I think maybe…I think maybe I’m going to be your mommy. What do you think about that?” She was almost trying out the notion, testing the words as she said them. But they felt so good, she could barely believe it.
She didn’t know how she would pull this off—find the mother and make it legal, she supposed. Somehow she would find a way. Somehow she could make this work. Somehow…
Somehow, in one night on her way to her new life, her dream had come true. Whoever that man was who’d told the girl that if you wanted something badly enough, it could happen, he must have been wise. A guru or a holy man or something. Because this felt like a gift. Like it really was meant to be.
Bending, she pressed her lips to Sam’s forehead as tears, happy ones this time, rolled down her cheeks. “I’ll find a way to make this work, Sam. I promise. And I will be the best mother you could ever wish for.”
1
Present Day
“Go, Sam! Woohoo!” Carrie pumped her fist in the air when her lanky teenage son nailed the soccer ball with the inside of his size-ten foot, sending it like a bullet past the goalie and into the net. He glanced her way, gave her a half smile that didn’t reach his eyes, then tapped the yellow band on his arm to remind everyone watching who that goal was for.
As she sat down again, Carrie was embarrassed by her outburst. It was inappropriate, given the circumstances.
The game continued, and she looked around at the other spectators. Parents and other locals, mostly, lining the bleachers at the edge of an extensive and well-groomed field behind Shadow Falls Central High. School hadn’t yet started—even though pre-season games and practices had begun for soccer, track and cheerleading.
September in Shadow Falls had a definite scent to it, and a distinct feeling to it, as well. You’d know autumn was coming even if you couldn’t see or hear a thing. The leaves were beginning to turn, though they were nowhere near their peak just yet. The sun was just as bright as it had been all summer long, but not as hot anymore, and the breeze had a brisk snap that was missing in the summer months. Fall was rolling in. You could feel it, taste it in the air.
But there was something besides autumn hanging in the air around Shadow Falls. There was a pall that was hard to miss. A lingering darkness that hadn’t let up for five days. It only grew, in fact. Every day that Kyle Becker didn’t come home, Shadow Falls got a little grimmer, a little grayer.
Even the tourists must know the reason for the town’s unusual melancholy mood by now. It was hard to miss, with the Teen Runaway posters stapled to every telephone pole, fence post and unsuspecting maple tree, and the thrice-daily gathering and dispatching of volunteer search parties in front of the old firehouse, just in case something had happened to him, a possibility no one wanted to contemplate too intently.
Every player on both soccer teams, the Blackberry Chiefs as well as the Shadow Falls Vikings, wore a yellow armband to show unity in hoping the missing sixteen-year-old would come home soon. Five days. Carrie didn’t know what the kid was thinking.
“Nice boot,” someone said nearby.
Carrie looked up to see local cop Bryan Kendall, in uniform, sitting four feet to her right. “It was, wasn’t it?” she said. “How are you, Bryan?”
He shrugged. “Been better.”
“I imagine you’re over your head in wedding plans about now, aren’t you? What have you got, six weeks to go?”
“Just under. But it’s not the wedding plans weighing me down. Though I gotta tell you, I’d just as soon elope and get straight to the honeymoon.”
“I’ll bet.”
“It’s this Kyle Becker thing,” he said.
She nodded, sighing. “The timing couldn’t be much worse, could it?”
“Not much. Tough checking out every stranger in town at the kickoff of leaf-peeper season.”
She nodded in sympathy as she scanned the bleachers, spotting a few unfamiliar faces among the locals, even here. Not many. The tourists preferred winery tours and foliage photo-ops to high school sporting events. But a few of them had discovered the soccer match and settled in to watch. One in particular caught her eye. He sat a few rows down and off to the left, and he was immersed in a supermarket tabloid with Shadow Falls’ latest scandal splashed on its front page.
Dead Woman Misidentified for More Than Sixteen Years.
Anonymous Source Puts Up Half-Million-Dollar Reward for Her Missing Baby.
Carrie closed her eyes, shook her head, wishing the story of her son’s birth mother would just go away already. But it was everywhere. And the idiot offering the reward wasn’t helping.
All those years ago, the dead woman had been identified as one Sarah Quinlan. It was only in the past few weeks that her true identity, Olivia Dupree, had been revealed. That had renewed interest in the case, and the additional information that the dead woman had given birth only weeks prior to her murder had given the story legs.
No one in Shadow Falls had known Olivia was pregnant or heard anything about a baby, but now everyone in the U.S. of A. suddenly seemed to be interested in speculating on what had become of it. Especially with the huge reward thrown into the mix.
Carrie hadn’t known the dead woman’s name when her body had been trundled into her hospital’s morgue for autopsy. But she’d recognized her face. It had been only six weeks since she’d last seen it, after all. She’d been searching Shadow Falls for the young woman, hoping to get her to sign the adoption papers that would officially make Sam Carrie’s own. On that horrible day, she’d realized it would never happen.
She alone knew what had become of the murder victim’s missing baby. He’d just scored a goal on the soccer field, and he didn’t even know he was adopted.
“You know that guy?” Bryan asked.
Carrie blinked and realized that her eyes were still glued to the tourist with the tabloid. He had long, honey and caramel hair, pulled back and held with a black rubber band. He had whiskers, too. Not a beard, exactly. Just a neatly trimmed layer of bristles that was probably supposed to be sexy.
Okay, it was sexy. Just not to her.
He wore jeans, and a T-shirt with several guitars on the front of it and some words underneath, but she was too far away to read them clearly.
“Carrie?”