Epilogue

They adore me.

They trust me.

How could they not love an adorably plump sixty-five-year-old woman with curly gray hair, crinkly eyes, and the warmest of laughs? A churchgoer, no less, named Mary, who drinks tea with milk and sugar. And a résumé with forty years of experience taking care of infants and toddlers.

That’s me…Nurse Mary Andrews. British au pair par excellence. So they think. My beautiful firstborn daughter, Mabel, may she rest in peace, wasn’t the only one in the family who could act.

It’s been almost three years since they released me. When I heard my six-year-old daughter, Marley, cry out my name, I couldn’t jump from the top of our building. How could I do something so selfish? I fell backward, hit my head, and was committed indefinitely to a local asylum. And my beloved little girl became a ward of the state. They didn’t allow her to visit me, but she wrote me letters and I wrote back.

Together, we came up with a foolproof plan to steal Ava’s beautiful baby girl and destroy her bastard husband, Ned, and murderous mother, Renata.

An unexpected hurricane blew it all to pieces. I worked hard to prove I was mentally competent. The day I was finally released was the day after Marley died. Such a tragic ending being hit by a bolt of lightning and falling off a cliff. I bet Ava just stood there, and, like her mother before her, looked the other way.

And did nothing.

Now, Ava has to pay.

I fiddle with the silver locket I found in her sock drawer. And smile.

At last, I, Mary Louise Mann, will have what’s mine.