Chương 4
“You have one bedroom and a cat that hates pregnancy.”
“Gregory hates joy in all forms. It isn’t personal.”
“I can’t sleep on your couch at eight months.”
“You can have the bed.”
“And you’ll sleep where?”
“On the couch. I’m not the size of a ceremonial drum.”
Clara looked at her.
Mara raised both hands. “You know I say insensitive things when I’m scared.”
“You say them when you’re comfortable too.”
“That’s fair.”
A knock came at the door.
Eleanor stood in the hallway. She had removed her emerald jacket and draped it over one arm. Without the structured shoulders, she appeared narrower. Rebecca waited behind her, speaking quietly into a phone.
“May I come in?” Eleanor asked.
Clara almost said no.
Instead she looked at Mara.
Mara shrugged. “I can throw a cup of ice at her if necessary.”
Eleanor heard. One corner of her mouth moved.
“Five minutes,” Clara said.
Eleanor entered alone and sat in the chair opposite Mara. She did not come near the bed. The monitor filled the room with the fast, steady rhythm of the baby’s heart.
For several seconds, none of them spoke.
Then Eleanor said, “I have a secure residence nearby. No staff beyond two people who have been with me for years. You would have a private floor, medical access, and control over who enters.”
“No.”
“I expected that.”
“Then why offer?”
“Because expecting refusal does not remove responsibility.”
Clara studied her. Eleanor’s language was careful, almost legal, but the pearl at her left ear turned beneath her fingers again.
“How did you lose me?”
Eleanor’s hand stopped.
Mara ceased folding the receipt.
“At Mercy General,” Eleanor said. “Thirty-two years ago. You were born at 2:14 in the morning after an emergency cesarean. I saw you for less than a minute. They said you had respiratory distress and took you to the neonatal unit.”
Clara touched the scarless skin above her belly as if her own body might understand the surgery described.
“Six hours later,” Eleanor continued, “a physician told me you had died.”
“And you believed him.”
“I had lost blood. I was medicated. Your father was in London, trying to return through a storm that grounded flights along the East Coast. My sister was with me, but she had been sent home to rest. The hospital administrator brought documents. A chaplain came. There was a coffin.”
“You opened it?”
Eleanor looked down.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I was told the damage from the emergency procedures would be difficult to see.”
Clara felt anger arrive with surprising clarity. “So you buried a box and never checked.”
Mara shifted in her chair.
Eleanor did not defend herself. “Yes.”
“That’s it?”
“That is the fact.”
“You had money. You had lawyers. You had whatever people like you have when they want answers.”
“I had them by the end of the week.”
“And?”
“The physician disappeared. The nurse assigned to the neonatal floor was found dead in what police called a single-car accident. Hospital records were altered. Your identifying footprint card was missing. Three infants born within the same twenty-four-hour period had incomplete files.”
Clara’s mouth went dry.
“Police investigated trafficking,” Eleanor said. “Nothing was proved. Your father spent six years following false reports. I spent twenty. We found children who were not ours. Families who believed we were trying to buy their daughters. People who fabricated evidence because they needed money. Once, a woman brought me a nine-year-old child and told her to call me Mommy in a hotel lobby.”
The last sentence cracked at the edge.
Eleanor recovered before the crack widened.
“When did you stop looking?” Clara asked.
“I never stopped completely. I stopped destroying every room I entered.”
Clara understood the answer more than she wanted to.
The baby moved beneath the monitor strap. Denise returned to check the tracing and asked Eleanor to step aside. Eleanor obeyed immediately. It was the first order Clara had seen her follow.
After Denise left, Clara said, “Why me now?”
“A private investigator reviewing old hospital litigation found a sealed juvenile intake record from another state. The child had been admitted at approximately six weeks old, without a birth certificate. She had a healed line near the left heel consistent with an improperly removed neonatal identification band. She also had a rare eye color noted by three foster placements because they thought it might help identify relatives.”
Clara had heard about the scar on her heel her entire life. A social worker once told her she had probably caught it on broken glass as a baby. She had imagined a careless mother, a filthy kitchen, a child left crawling among bottles.
“Your juvenile file was sealed,” Eleanor said. “Obtaining lawful access took time. By then, you had changed your surname through marriage.”
Julian had insisted on that.
Not hyphenated. Not retained. Vale only.
At the time, he had said he wanted them to begin with one name because neither of them had a family worth preserving.
Clara turned toward the dark television.
“How did Julian become part of the investigation?”
Eleanor and Mara exchanged a look.
Clara saw it. “Don’t.”
Eleanor answered. “A Sterling trust account paid a consulting invoice to Vale Advisory Group eleven months ago.”
“Why?”
“The invoice was fraudulent.”
“What kind of consulting?”
“Genealogical risk assessment.”
Mara blinked. “That sounds fake even for rich people.”
“It was designed to sound boring,” Eleanor said. “The trust was conducting a legitimate review of dormant beneficiary provisions. Someone inside the process hired an outside records broker. Julian’s firm received partial data before the contract was terminated.”
Clara’s breath slowed.
“You think he learned who I was.”
“We know he accessed your sealed foster records through an intermediary eight months before he proposed to you.”
Mara stopped moving.
May you like
The monitor continued its cheerful rhythm.
Clara remembered Julian’s proposal in a parking lot behind a restaurant because the dining room had been too loud and he said he could not wait another hour. He had knelt on wet pavement in a navy suit. The ring had been too large, then. She had laughed when it spun around her finger.
