And the reason it still existed, the reason there was any evidence at all, was that Gabriela had grabbed her daughter and fled before anyone could finish scraping the original label clean.

Her terror that night, which she had spent three years second-guessing as paranoia, turned out to have been the single most clear-eyed act of her life.

I looked at her looking at that band, and I understood that we were no longer dealing with a heartless father buying off an ex-girlfriend.

We were dealing with something that had reached into a delivery room and tried to steal a child, and had left its fingerprint on a pink plastic bracelet in a shoebox in Brooklyn.

Chapter 24 — The Confession on the Line

The only sound in the apartment was the refrigerator’s hum and the rustle of Arabella at her blocks.