Chương 5
“Why?”
“I was twenty-eight.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
She waited.
Ethan exhaled.
“Because I wanted it over.”
“For you.”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever see her?”
“Rebecca?”
“Yes.”
“Once.”
Claire stood up from the kitchen table.
“When?”
“At the hospital.”
“Before the switch?”
“No.”
The room went very still.
“After?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
Ethan did not answer.
“Ethan.”
“She asked me if I worked there.”
Claire gripped the back of a chair.
“And?”
“I said no.”
“What else?”
“She asked if I knew where the nursery was.”
Claire could hear traffic through his phone.
He might have been in a car.
“She was in a wheelchair,” he said. “She had an IV. She looked terrible. She kept saying they wouldn’t let her see her baby.”
Claire pressed her lips together.
“And you knew where her baby was.”
“Yes.”
“With me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
His voice broke on the single word.
Not loudly.
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“I know.”
“Why did you do it?”
For several seconds there was only road noise.
Then Ethan said, “Because Daniel told me your son was dead and you were going to wake up.”
Claire sat down.
Ethan continued before she could stop him.
“Daniel was out of his mind. I had never seen him like that. He kept saying you would die too if they told you. Margaret said that was ridiculous, but then he said there was another baby whose mother was unconscious and no father had been located yet. He knew one of the hospital administrators. I don’t know how the idea started. I swear to God, Claire, I don’t know who said it first.”
“But you did it.”
“Yes.”
“What did you physically do?”
Ethan’s breath caught.
Claire waited.
“I changed two identification cards.”
Her stomach turned.
“And the wristbands?”
“A nurse did that.”
“Which nurse?”
“I don’t know her current name.”
“Try.”
“Carol Madsen.”
Claire wrote it down.
“What happened to my baby?”
“He was placed in Lucas Shaw’s bassinet.”
The kitchen blurred.
Claire stared at the moose magnet.
“Rebecca saw him.”
“Later.”
“She buried my son.”
“Yes.”
The word was almost inaudible.
Claire covered her mouth.
Rebecca had buried Claire’s child.
Claire had taken Rebecca’s home.
Daniel had arranged both facts and then spent seven years cutting pancakes for Noah on Sunday mornings.
“Did Daniel ever regret it?”
Ethan’s answer came too quickly.
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“He talked about undoing it.”
“When?”
“After his diagnosis.”
“Did he?”
“No.”
“Then don’t tell me he regretted it.”
She ended the call.
For two days Claire did almost nothing useful.
She took Noah to school.
She bought milk.
She forgot the milk in the trunk overnight and found it swollen inside the grocery bag the next morning.
She stood at the sink and laughed.
It was the first laugh since the mountain.
Mia, making toast behind her, looked startled.
Claire held up the ruined carton.
“Seven dollars.”
Mia began laughing too.
Neither of them could stop for nearly a minute.
Then Claire cried so hard she had to sit on the floor.
Noah came in wearing one sneaker.
He looked from Claire to Mia.
“What happened?”
“The milk exploded,” Mia said.
Noah inspected the carton.
“That’s not funny.”
This made Mia laugh again.
Claire wiped her face.
“You’re right.”
“Adults are weird.”
“Yes.”
He found his other sneaker beneath the couch and left for school complaining about a math quiz.
Claire kept Rebecca’s name out of her mouth around him.
She also stopped calling him her son inside her own head whenever she was afraid, then hated herself for stopping.
At night she stood in his doorway and watched him sleep.
Once, at two in the morning, he opened one eye.
“Mom, you’re being creepy.”
“Sorry.”
“Go to bed.”
“All right.”
“Close my door.”
She did.
By the end of the week, Anna had hired an investigator.
By the second week, the hospital had retained outside counsel.
By the third, Ethan resigned temporarily from his position at Bennett Mountain Group, using the phrase personal family matter in a statement so bloodless Claire almost admired it.
Margaret remained chair of the board.
Claire called her.
“You need to resign too.”
Margaret said, “The company has thirty-eight hundred employees.”
“You took a baby.”
“Yes.”
Claire had prepared for denial.
The agreement disoriented her.
“You don’t get to say yes like that makes you accountable.”
“I didn’t say it did.”
“Then resign.”
“My disappearance from the company would create speculation that would reach Noah before you are ready.”
Claire hated that Margaret was not entirely wrong.
“Temporary leave.”
Margaret was quiet.
“Yes.”
Three hours later the company announced it.
Public curiosity lasted approximately one business day before someone on a finance forum posted that the Bennetts were fighting over Daniel’s estate.
Claire watched strangers invent versions of her life.
In one, she was trying to take the company.
In another, Ethan had embezzled money.
Someone wrote that Margaret was sick.
Someone else claimed Claire was having an affair with Ethan.
She closed the browser.
Modern humiliation, she discovered, did not require anybody to know the truth.
Rebecca Shaw did not respond to the investigator’s first letter.
Or the second.
Claire understood.
If a stranger wrote that your dead infant might not have been your dead infant, perhaps silence was the most reasonable answer available.
Then, twenty-four days after the mountain, Rebecca called Anna.
She agreed to speak with Claire by video.
No recording.
No lawyers visible.
No Noah.
Claire changed shirts four times.
She hated herself for caring what she wore.
Finally she chose a gray sweater she had owned before Daniel.
Rebecca appeared on the screen at 7:03 p.m.
She was forty-three now.
Dark hair streaked with gray. Thin face. Reading glasses. A blue mug in both hands.
For several seconds neither woman spoke.
Claire had imagined this meeting so many ways that the ordinariness of Rebecca’s kitchen felt like an error.
May you like
There were magnets on her refrigerator too.
A grocery list.
