CHAPTER 6 — THE SECOND BABY
CHAPTER 6 — THE SECOND BABY
The photograph sat on the hospital table between us.
Two newborn girls.
Wrapped in identical pink blankets.
One of them was me.
The other had been nothing more than a mystery until Detective Sarah Mills turned the picture over and showed us my mother's handwriting.
One was enough. The other had to disappear.
Nobody spoke.
Even Lily, coloring quietly in her hospital bed, seemed to sense the weight in the room.
Marcus finally broke the silence.
"You're saying there was another baby?"
Detective Mills nodded.
"We're saying we can now prove your parents knew about a second infant."
Evelyn Carter's face lost all color.
"My baby..."
Detective Mills gently shook her head.
"We don't know whose child the second infant was."
"But we know someone tried very hard to erase her."
The investigation accelerated that afternoon.
A court order gave detectives access to every surviving record from St. Catherine's Hospital.
Most files had been digitized years ago.
Others had been destroyed in a flood.
But buried inside an off-site storage facility, investigators found something no one expected.
An old maternity logbook.
Handwritten.
Dated the night I was born.
One page had been torn almost completely out.
Almost.
A narrow strip remained attached to the binding.
On it were three names.
Evelyn Carter.
Rachel Doe.
Infant Female — Unknown.
Detective Mills frowned.
"Rachel Doe?"
The hospital archivist nodded.
"That's what hospitals often recorded when a newborn hadn't yet been legally named."
"So Rachel wasn't the mother's name."
"No."
"It was the baby's temporary name."
I stared at the page.
For twenty-nine years, I hadn't even known my first name hadn't been chosen by the people who raised me.
Then came the breakthrough.
A retired nurse called the police.
She was eighty-three years old.
She had seen the news coverage of my parents' arrest.
She asked one question.
"Did this happen at St. Catherine's?"
When detectives answered yes...
she began crying.
Her name was Helen Brooks.
She had worked the night shift in the maternity ward nearly three decades earlier.
"I've carried this for years," she told investigators.
"I was too afraid to come forward."
Detective Mills arranged for Marcus, Evelyn, and me to meet her.
The elderly nurse's hands trembled as she held a faded employee photograph.
"I remember your face."
She looked at Evelyn.
"You screamed until you lost your voice."
Evelyn nodded through tears.
"They told me my baby died."
Helen slowly shook her head.
"I never believed it."
She described the chaos that night.
A power outage.
Emergency generators failing.
Doctors rushing between operating rooms.
Newborns temporarily moved into a single nursery.
Then...
people who weren't hospital staff walking through restricted hallways.
Detective Mills leaned forward.
"Visitors?"
"No."
"Administrators."
She hesitated.
"And a lawyer."
Thomas Avery.
The same attorney who had represented my adoptive parents.
Marcus whispered,
"My God..."
Helen looked directly at me.
"I remember another woman."
"Who?"
"Margaret Collins."
My adoptive mother.
"She wasn't supposed to be anywhere near the nursery."
"But she was."
Helen closed her eyes.
"I saw her holding one of the babies."
"Which baby?"
"I don't know."
"I only remember thinking..."
She swallowed.
"...that adoptive parents aren't usually allowed into the nursery before paperwork is completed."
Detective Mills scribbled notes furiously.
"Did you report it?"
"I tried."
"What happened?"
"My supervisor told me to forget what I'd seen."
"Why?"
Helen looked down.
"Because donations had just been made to the hospital."
"Large donations."
Money.
Again.
Everything seemed to lead back to money.
Three days later the grand jury convened.
The district attorney announced additional indictments.
Richard Collins.
Margaret Collins.
Vanessa Collins.
And two former hospital administrators.
Charges now included conspiracy, evidence tampering, fraud, and crimes connected to the illegal adoption network that had operated for years under the cover of legitimate placements.
The story exploded across national news.
Not because of me.
Because investigators believed they had uncovered dozens of suspicious adoptions stretching back almost twenty years.
Families everywhere began asking questions they had buried long ago.
Meanwhile, Lily grew stronger.
By the end of the week she was walking the hospital hallways in fuzzy yellow socks.
She insisted on carrying her stuffed rabbit tucked under one arm.
One afternoon she climbed into my lap.
"Mommy?"
"Yes, sweetheart?"
"Grandma doesn't love me."
The words shattered me.
I pulled her close.
"No."
I kissed the top of her head.
"Grandma didn't know how to love anyone."
Lily considered that carefully.
Then she asked,
"Will I get a new grandma?"
Across the room, Evelyn looked up from the coloring book she was sharing with Marcus.
She smiled uncertainly.
Lily hopped off my lap, walked straight across the room, and climbed onto Evelyn's knees as though she'd known her forever.
"You smell like cookies."
Everyone laughed.
Evelyn cried again.
"I bake a lot."
"Good."
Lily wrapped tiny arms around her neck.
"You can be Cookie Grandma."
Evelyn completely fell apart.
She hugged Lily with the careful tenderness of someone afraid happiness might disappear if she held it too tightly.
Marcus slipped his arm around my shoulders.
"I think Lily just solved that problem."
A month later, prosecutors offered Vanessa a plea agreement.
She refused.
She insisted she had only followed our mother's instructions.
"I never meant for Lily to die," she told detectives.
"But you helped drug her."
"My mother said she'd sleep through the party."
"You helped carry her."
"I thought she'd wake up."
"You helped close the dumpster."
Vanessa finally broke.
"I didn't think about the heat."
No one in the room felt sympathy.
Not after seeing the photographs.
Not after reading the medical report that concluded Lily had been minutes away from irreversible organ failure when Marcus and I found her.
Then, on the eve of the trial, Detective Mills came to our house with one final update.
She placed a slim folder on the kitchen table.
"We identified the second baby."
Every heartbeat in my body seemed to stop.
"The photograph?"
"Yes."
Marcus sat beside me.
"Who was she?"
The detective smiled for the first time in weeks.
"Alive."
I blinked.
"What?"
"She's alive."
Evelyn gasped.
"Where?"
"She was legally adopted by another family."
I looked at the detective, barely breathing.
"Does she know?"
"No."
"Does she know any of this?"
"Not yet."
The detective slid across a recent photograph.
A woman in her late twenties.
Dark hair.
Kind eyes.
Standing beside two little boys in a playground.
She looked... ordinary.
Happy.
Completely unaware that the first hours of her life had become part of a criminal conspiracy spanning three decades.
There was one sticky note attached to the picture.
Interview scheduled for Monday morning.
I stared at it.
Three decades of lies were finally unraveling.
But Monday would bring something none of us expected.
Because the woman in the photograph wasn't just another victim.
She had been investigating her own adoption in secret.
And she had already uncovered one piece of evidence that no detective, no prosecutor, and no member of my family had ever seen.
May you like
A cassette tape recorded inside the maternity ward...
on the very night I was born.
