Anne’s end of the line went silent, except for a crackle of static. “What do you mean?”

“Are you where you can talk, free from little ears?”

“Yeah.” She sounded scared now, and I couldn’t blame her. “Hadley’s watching TV with my mom.” They were staying with Anne’s parents, because she couldn’t stand the thought of taking her daughter home to the scene of her husband’s murder. “What’s wrong? Olivia? Cam?”

Liv exhaled slowly. “He wasn’t after Shen. He was after Hadley.”

For one long moment, there was only silence, as if she’d actually stopped breathing. “No,” Anne whispered at last, and I could practically see her shaking her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he want Hadley? How do you know?”

“He had her picture,” I said, suddenly almost as desperate to know for sure about Hadley’s paternity as I was eager to keep Liv from finding out. “With your handwriting on the back.”

“What picture?” Anne’s voice was low. Stunned. Pained. And I wondered if I should feel the same way. If Hadley was mine, shouldn’t I be terrified for her and ready to kill anyone who even tried to hurt the blood of my blood? Or something like that?

“Hadley’s kindergarten school picture.” Liv glanced at me, and I had to force my jaw to unlock. I couldn’t even make sense of the storm of fear and confusion raging inside me. “It was wallet-size, and kinda beat-up. He had it in his pocket.”

“Why?” There was a thin thread of panic woven through that one word, and it rang a harmonic chord in me. “Why would a murderer have my daughter’s picture?”

“I don’t know,” Liv admitted, as I pulled into the parking lot in front of my building. “But someone wants her dead. If there’s anything you think we should know about Hadley, this is the time to tell us.”

“What do you mean? What would you need da ” But her voice was missing the confusion her words tried to imply. She was hiding something, and I was afraid I knew what it was.

Liv turned to me, as I pulled into my assigned parking spot, wordlessly requesting my participation, but I shook my head. I couldn’t ask what needed to be asked. Not with her listening.

Olivia rolled her eyes at my reluctance and turned back to the phone she’d laid on the dashboard. “Who’s Hadley’s father, Anne? We’ve seen her photo. There’s no way she’s Shen’s.”

Anne’s sniffling grew louder, and for a moment I was afraid she’d hang up. Then she cleared her throat, and her next words were firm, her voice surprisingly steady. “Shen is her dad—the only father she’s ever known.”

Her obviously unconscious use of present tense verbs made me ache for her loss, and her strength amazed me. I’d seen cold, hard men fall to pieces over the death of wives and children, and I couldn’t imagine how she was holding up so well under the extenuating circumstances Liv had just hit her with.

“Okay, I understand that. And I know these aren’t the kinds of questions you want to answer right now. But, Annika, someone’s trying to kill your daughter, and if you want me to help keep that from happening, I need to know anything and everything that might lead me to whoever wants her dead. Or at least tell me why she’s been targeted. So who is her father, Anne? Her real father?”

Another moment passed in silence, and my heart beat frantically, almost painfully. I was sure Anne was going to say my name. Or that she’d hang up to avoid having to. But instead, she cleared her throat again—a nervous habit—and springs squealed over the line as she sat down somewhere in her mother’s house, in a suburb thirty miles away. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Liv glanced at me, frustration and disbelief lining her forehead and outlining the corners of her mouth, and I could only shrug. My only possible contribution to the conversation was the question I desperately didn’t want to ask, and I could see no real benefit of asking it. If I were the father, knowing that wouldn’t shed any light on the real question—why Hadley was being targeted. And if I wasn’t the father, I’d have just admitted to sleeping with Anne—a drunken, reactionary mistake I’d regretted the moment it was over. And Liv would probably never speak to me again.

Sleeping with random strangers years after we broke up was different from sleeping with her best friend the night Liv left. And at that moment, admitting what I’d done would only hurt everyone involved. Including Hadley.

“I already had her when I met Shen, and he loved her like she was his own,” Anne finally admitted. “But no, I don’t know who her biological father is.”

My grip around the wheel tightened until my knuckles stood out, white in the glow from the parking-lot light overhead. Was she telling the truth, or just trying to avoid outing me in front of Liv? Either way, her silence on the issue was both blessing and curse. If I was a father, I wanted to know it. I wanted to know Hadley.

Liv glanced at me again, and I avoided her gaze to keep her from reading the confliction surely obvious in my expression. She picked up the phone and held it between us. “Surely you have an idea. Like, a list, or something, that we could use to narrow it down?”

“Liv…” I began, humiliated for both myself and for Annika.

“No, I don’t have a list,” Anne snapped. “What I have is a very upset little girl who’s just lost the only father she’s ever known. She’s away from her home and all her things, and she doesn’t really understand why her dad won’t be coming home again. And now you’re telling me that whoever killed Shen will probably be coming back for Hadley, but instead of trying to help keep her safe, you’re interrogating me about my past sex life!”