Page 11

CHAPTER 10

Raleigh, North Carolina Thursday, July 11, 2024

THE HASTINGS CANCELLED THEIR SCHEDULES FOR THE REST OF THE day and drove home with Sloan. The three sat at the kitchen table with all of Sloan’s research spread around them—tabloid covers, newspaper articles, and the detailed family tree James had constructed. Although Sloan had never seriously considered that her parents knew any more about her origins than they had already told her, the astonishment in their faces as they paged through Sloan’s findings was enough to remove any morsel of doubt that might be hidden in the shadowed corners of her mind.

“How accurate are these DNA sites?” her father asked.

“I asked James the same question. His answer was ninety-nine point nine percent accurate.” Sloan held up another image of baby Charlotte in her parents’ arms. “So this girl is me. Or I’m her, or whatever.” Sloan tossed the picture onto the table in frustration. “The adoption agency you went through, can you get all my records?”

Sloan saw her parents offer each other a nervous glance.

“We have paperwork,” her father said. “But it’s not from an adoption agency. We were initially connected with an agency, and we were on their list, but after a few potential matches fell through we decided to go outside the agency.”

“Outside the agency? What does that mean?”

“Private adoption,” her mother said. “We were still on the list with the agency, but it had been such a long and laborious process with lots of leads that ended up in disappointment, that we started to look for other options. We’d heard of other couples finding birth parents on their own and working directly with them instead of going through an agency. Many of those stories had happy endings, and the process of private adoption was much faster when the middleman was removed.”

“So if it wasn’t through an adoption agency, how did you find me?”

“This was back in 1995,” her dad said. “The Internet was new and just taking off. The World Wide Web and cell phones and texting and instant communication with anyone around the world is all you know, Sloan, but when we started the adoption process the Internet was this new and foreign thing. With the broad use of the Internet came an urgency among the adoption community to get in on the ground floor of this new technology. To not miss out on the chance to eliminate the middleman of an adoption agency, streamline the process, and meet birth parents online who wanted to find adoptive parents directly. It was like the Gold Rush. Once word spread about successful matches, everyone flocked to the Internet to try private adoptions themselves. We had been working with the agency for three years by then and hadn’t been placed with a birth mother, so we decided to use the Internet. We met your birth mother pretty quickly. Two months later, we signed the papers and you were ours.”

“Did you meet her?” Sloan asked. “My birth mother?”

Dolly nodded. “Of course.”

Sloan held up the picture from the cover of Events Magazine, pointing at Annabelle Margolis. “Was this her?”

Sloan saw her parents glance at each other again before her mother shook her head. “No.”

Sloan took a deep breath. “My God, what the hell is happening?”

“We have the paperwork,” Dolly Hastings muttered to herself.

Sloan took a deep breath. “So either my DNA profile, which is statistically impossible to be incorrectly matched to this family, is wrong, or something really shady happened when you adopted me. Like, this Wendy Downing woman who claimed to be my birth mother kidnapped me, or something. Christ, I don’t know!”

Her dad came over and rubbed her back. “It’s okay, sweetie. We’re going to figure this out. But I think . . .” Todd Hastings glanced at his wife. “With everything you’ve discovered, I think we need to call the police.”