Chương 3
“I hope they do.”
“You don’t sound like it.”
“I hope every page is fake. I hope Diane Mercer is confused. I hope the bracelet was a training band, the transfer number is a coincidence, Emily Carter just happens to have your ear, and I go home feeling like an idiot.”
“You don’t.”
“No.”
“You want her to be Ava.”
Rachel’s lips pressed together.
It was the cruelest accusation available because it was also partly true.
She looked at the concrete between their shoes.
“I want my daughter not to have died.”
Ethan’s anger disappeared so quickly it left him unsteady.
Rachel spoke without looking up.
“I also don’t want to walk into another family’s life and discover that the only reason I can breathe again is because they can’t.”
The ventilation fans continued their indifferent hum.
Ethan put the envelope back on the hood.
“Come upstairs.”
Rachel glanced toward the elevator.
“No.”
“Why?”
“I can’t sit in that apartment.”
“You’ve never been in it.”
“I know.”
“Then what’s wrong with it?”
“You moved there after you decided our house was too full of ghosts.”
“I moved there after we sold the house.”
“You were looking at apartments before we listed it.”
“Rachel.”
“I know. Not tonight.”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Where, then?”
“Twenty-four-hour diner on Wilson.”
“You want to discuss possible hospital fraud involving our dead daughter over pancakes?”
“They have booths.”
“That’s your standard?”
“Right now, yes.”
He almost objected again.
Then he looked at the envelope.
Twenty minutes later they were sitting across from each other under warm pendant lights in a nearly empty diner, drinking coffee neither wanted.
Rachel kept the envelope beside her thigh until their server, a college-aged man with a silver ring through one eyebrow, finished telling them the kitchen was out of pecan pie.
“I wasn’t ordering pie,” Ethan said.
“Just letting you know.”
“Thank you.”
When he left, Rachel looked at Ethan.
“You sounded offended by the pie situation.”
“I don’t like being informed of losses I haven’t experienced.”
“That may be the most Ethan sentence you’ve ever said.”
For a moment, neither of them smiled.
Then Rachel did.
Barely.
It hurt more than the garage.
She opened the envelope.
The first document was a photocopy of an infant transport record. Most of it looked familiar: date, origin hospital, destination, patient identification number, weight, oxygen saturation, attending physician.
Near the bottom was a handwritten notation.
ID BAND REPLACED ON ARRIVAL — ORIGINAL DAMAGED.
Ethan read it twice.
“That’s not unusual.”
“You don’t know that.”
“It could happen.”
“It could.”
The next page was an internal incident form. It contained no patient name, only transport number and date. Under “nature of discrepancy,” someone had typed: mismatch between receiving wrist identification and electronic admission record.
Ethan’s coffee sat untouched.
“Who signed this?”
“Linda Mercer.”
“And?”
“Carl Reeve.”
He followed the initials.
The third signature was illegible.
Rachel handed him a magnifying glass from the envelope.
He looked at her.
“You brought a magnifying glass?”
“I’m forty percent embarrassed.”
“You should increase that.”
“It’s from CVS.”
“I wasn’t asking where.”
Despite himself, he used it.
The illegible signature resolved into a looping J and something that might have been a V.
“Judith,” he said.
Rachel leaned forward.
“What?”
“The woman who asked me to sign the statement.”
“You said you didn’t remember her.”
“I remembered her hair.”
“What was her last name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try.”
He closed his eyes.
Hospital conference room. Styrofoam cup. A legal pad. Someone speaking very softly because Rachel was asleep two floors away after the sedative the doctor had given her.
Judith.
Risk management.
He saw a badge turned backward on a lanyard.
A last name beginning with V.
“Vance,” he said.
Rachel’s face changed.
She reached into her purse, unlocked her phone and pulled up a document.
“Judith Vance was St. Vincent’s director of clinical risk management.”
“How do you know that?”
“She signed a deposition in a malpractice case six years later.”
“About Ava?”
“No. Unrelated surgical case.”
“And she still worked there?”
“Until two years ago.”
Ethan stared at the incident report again.
“If this was a serious identity mismatch, there would’ve been an investigation.”
“There was.”
“Then where is it?”
“Exactly.”
He looked up.
“That is not evidence that it disappeared.”
“No. This is.”
Rachel slid another page toward him.
It was a printout of an email.
From Linda Mercer to an address Ethan did not recognize.
Subject: Re: 2/14 transfer discrepancy.
The body was short.
I am not signing the amended form until somebody explains why the receiving label was generated before the ambulance arrived.
Ethan read the sentence several times.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must have a theory.”
“I have twelve.”
“I’m not asking for twelve.”
“The electronic label for Ava’s admission at St. Vincent appears to have been printed at 1:17 a.m.”
“She arrived around two.”
“2:06.”
“So somebody printed the label in advance.”
“Maybe.”
“That could be normal.”
“Maybe.”
Rachel reached for her coffee.
Her fingers trembled against the ceramic.
Ethan noticed and pretended not to.
The next document was a letter.
Not an official record.
Three handwritten pages from Linda Mercer, dated seven months earlier.
Rachel had highlighted nothing.
Ethan appreciated that.
The letter did not contain a confession. It contained fragments.
Linda wrote that she had spent years trying to convince herself the discrepancy was clerical. She wrote that Carl Reeve had insisted the bracelets from both infants be destroyed after the correction. She wrote that she had kept one because destroying it felt wrong. She wrote that two infant girls had been processed through receiving within forty minutes that night.
One was Ava Walker.
The other was Baby Girl Hayes.
Ethan stopped.
“What happened to Hayes?”
Rachel did not answer.
He looked up.
“What happened?”
“She was transferred from a different hospital for emergency cardiac surgery.”
“And?”
May you like
“She was pronounced dead at 3:41 that morning.”
His chair made a faint scraping sound when he shifted.
