“I may have made the same mistake.”
Leo searched the recording of their session on his phone.
“Here it is,” he said, pressing play.
“She said if I ever left, I would tell the police who had helped her. And if she told me about the father, I would tell that, too, and then he would take the baby. She was scared. This wasn’t about her keeping secrets from me just to be mean, which she did a lot. And she was also right. If I had left the island, I would have told everything and anything I could to help find her and save her. And to punish the wicked people who wouldn’t let us leave. I’m doing that now. I’m telling you everything I can think of and I don’t care who gets in trouble.”
Leo stopped the recording. “She says later that she thinks the father was a boy Emma met in Paris that summer—at her summer program. The timing of that fits.”
“She had the baby in March. She was in Paris June and July. It does fit. But what about this mysterious person who links her to the Pratts?”
Leo found another piece of the interview to play.
“She just said it was someone she trusted. She said when she told this person she was pregnant and needed to leave home to have her baby, this person found the Pratts. Emma said it took nearly two weeks. That it had something to do with runaway teenagers. Emma said that the Pratts were not going to adopt the baby but were just going to help her take care of it until she could figure out what to do. I can’t even tell you how strange it was when we both saw Lucy get crazy, keeping the baby for herself, keeping Emma away from her own child, there was like this panic that grew so slowly, a little every day, from little moments that were just not right, but then what did we know about what was right? We had never raised a baby. We had never had a child. Maybe this is what people do when they help you like that.”
“That’s when she looked right at you, Abby? Remember?”
Abby nodded, her eyes fixed on Leo’s phone and the voice of Cass Tanner.
“When you don’t know something like that—like how to take care of a baby—but then the people who have taken care of you and pretended to love you are doing something that seems wrong, it can make you feel crazy. Like your thoughts about them being wrong are crazy because they’re saying all these things that sound right. And because there are these moments when it seems as though the love is real.”
Leo stopped the recording again. “Do you think she was trying to tell you something? Something she wasn’t able to say?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she thought I was the person in the room most likely to understand it because of my training.”
“Was she right?”
“Yeah. She was right.”
Cass did not have to explain any of this to Abby. The girls had been isolated with two parental figures—people whom they had reached out to for help. They had not been drugged and thrown in a trunk. They had not been abducted at gunpoint or brainwashed. They had sought refuge, from what exactly was still unclear, but they had been offered something truly generous. And then there had been many months of what appeared to be genuine affection coupled with family activities like board games, TV, and the daily tasks of making food, collecting wood for the fire, tending to the house and the laundry in conditions that were antiquated at best.
Cass was also given ballet lessons, something her mother had refused her.
“I told Lucy that I had always wanted to dance. Remember?”
Judy Martin had not remembered. Or maybe she just pretended not to remember. This was the first Abby had heard of it, so if Cass had wanted to dance, she did not tell anyone who had been willing to admit it three years ago, when every detail of Cass’s life was being investigated.
“She bought me two pairs of shoes and six leotards and Bill installed a barre in the living room. Lucy didn’t know about dancing, but we got a video and some books and I practiced every day for forty-seven minutes because that was how long the video was. And you know what else? After Emma had her baby, she started to join me and we danced together, sometimes to music that wasn’t very balletlike. And then we would laugh and Lucy would laugh with us. And in between times like that, Emma would cry to hold her baby and Lucy would scold her and tell her to go to her room.”
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