Lennie discovers Bailey’s notes on searching for her mother

Lennie discovers Bailey’s notes on searching for her mother while sorting through her dead sister’s belongings. The nearly full notebook transforms the family’s vague knowledge of Paige’s absence into evidence of Bailey’s sustained, private investigation—and exposes the fear that had kept Lennie from wanting the search to succeed.

Background and Discovery

After walking home from the river, Lennie returns to Bailey’s desk. She has not yet called the private detective whose card she has kept, and she has not packed Bailey’s things. She begins with the desk drawers, placing school notebooks and journals into cartons; she deliberately does not read the journals. At the bottom of one drawer, an open notebook catches her attention. Its pages are covered with Bailey’s handwriting, columns of names, and lines crossing out most of the entries. Lennie’s first response is guilt at looking, followed by surprise and fear at what the pages contain.

The notes combine Paige’s name with other names and possible clues. One section pairs Paige with people and references associated with John Lennon, whom the sisters understand to be connected to Lennie’s name and possibly to their mother’s musical tastes. The notebook is not a passing list: it records repeated attempts to imagine names and identities through which Paige might be found. An entry pairing Paige with Dakota includes an address in North Hampton, Massachusetts, later crossed out; beside it Bailey wrote that the person there was too young. The crossed-out possibilities make the search’s limits visible alongside its persistence.

What the Notebook Reveals

Lennie and Bailey had both tried searching their mother’s name online, and had sometimes guessed at pseudonyms, but Bailey’s notebook shows a far more systematic effort than Lennie knew about. It is almost full, and Lennie infers that Bailey worked on it whenever she could, often without Lennie noticing her at the computer. She recalls seeing Bailey frequently in front of The Half Mom, studying it intently, and now wonders whether that attention was connected to the search.

The notebook’s first page is dated February 27, less than two months before Bailey’s death. That date compresses the discovery: Bailey had filled much of the notebook in a short period, while apparently concealing the work from her sister. Lennie wishes Bailey had asked her for help. The notes therefore reveal both a concrete objective—finding Paige—and a silence between the sisters: Bailey pursued the search without telling Lennie, while Lennie had not understood how much effort it involved.

Lennie Takes Up the Search

After reading the notebook, Lennie returns it to the drawer and plays Joe’s song on her clarinet, wanting to be with Bailey again in memory. Later, after waking and feeling able to breathe a little more freely, she takes the notebook from the desk drawer where she now keeps it and decides to enter the remaining combinations. She frames the task as something she can do for her sister: finding their mother on Bailey’s behalf.

Continuing the search changes Lennie’s understanding of Bailey’s motive. She connects it to the fact that Bailey was becoming a mother herself, but also recognizes a deeper possibility: she had always thought Bailey’s lifelong restlessness helped drive her desire to find Paige. Lennie had resisted the search because she feared their mother might show Bailey a way out of their life together. She suspects Bailey understood that Lennie would try to stop her, which helps explain why she kept the investigation private.

Significance

The notebook turns Paige’s long absence from a family story into a record of active searching: names tested, possibilities crossed out, and an address considered and rejected. For Lennie, its discovery brings grief together with belated knowledge of her sister. She cannot ask Bailey why she searched or why she hid it, but she can continue the work Bailey left unfinished. The event thus becomes both an act of mourning and a step toward recognizing that love for Bailey did not require Lennie to keep her sister from seeking a life beyond their shared home.