Page 110 of The Souls of Lost Lake

Wren limped to her feet as Pippin hauled her up.

“Please...” She opted for begging. Maybe that would anchor itself somewhere in the cold tundra of her brother’s glacial soul.

“Nice try.” He shoved her forward again. This time she could move her feet, so she followed his direction.

She ducked under another branch. Thornbushes jabbed at her shorts, snagging them. Wren ripped through them, Pippin behind her. She noticed he still held his knife. It was more than a pocketknife. As a kid she’d seen one of the camp staff gut a deer with a knife just like it.

“You know the baby in that article was me, don’t you?” Wren hated where her mind was taking her. Down narrow, dark alleyways of suspicion threaded with unclear theories.

“Arwen Blythe, what are you insinuating?” Pippin snapped a twig off a tree as he passed.

“I don’t know.” She grunted as her toe tripped over a rock that jutted up in the trail. “I haven’t pieced it together.” She didn’t wantto either. Wren had suspected her father, suspected something not legitimate. But Pippin? He’d been twelve—twelveback then.

Pippin’s arm pushed in front of Wren, holding back a large leafy branch that blocked the trail. She glared at him as she squeezed through. The branch snapped back into place.

Pippin followed Wren. “It really upset Mom after she miscarried the babies.” His voice was monotone. Stating a simple fact that wound its way around Wren’s heart with a squeezing sensation that threatened to make it stop beating.

“I know.” Wren raised her bound hands to push the hair from her eyes.

“She didn’t deserve to suffer like that.”

“So what happened? They bought a baby from the black market?” Wren asked.

Pippin grabbed her shirt and yanked her back. Wren stumbled, reaching for her brother to keep from falling again. Her knee already throbbed, and a thin line of blood was running down her ankle into her sock.

Pippin was irritated. At least he showed emotion now, but Wren shrank away from his intensity.

“Black market?” He snorted in disbelief. “Is that what you think?”

“What else is there?”

“Who do you think took care of Mom all those years?”

Confused, Wren drew back. “Dad?”

“Me.” Pippin jabbed at his chest with his finger. “Dad all but lived on campus.”

“So? What does that have to do with anything?”

Pippin stared at her as if she were the one who’d lost her mind. “She lost babies.”

“I know she did.”

“She needed a baby.”

There was a nagging intuition in her gut, yet Wren refused to entertain it. “And?”

“I found her one.”

Wren stilled. It was what she had feared, ignored, avoided. “You can’t be serious.”

Pippin smiled grimly. “I found you. In the park. There in a stroller. Alone. You needed a mother.”

Wren choked. It felt as though fingers were closing around her throat, except Pippin wasn’t touching her. “Youtookme?”

Pippin shrugged. “The woman watching you was chatting it up with a few other ladies. You were asleep. When I brought you home”—his gaze grew distant—“Mom fell in love with you. Immediately.”

“Thatwomanin the park was my ... mymother!” Wren sputtered.