Chapter 3

Morning at St. Brigid's, the gala's leftover lilies still banked in the lobby, filling the whole ground floor with something too sweet. Claire came in on board business and smiled at the desk staff and signed the visitor log, and when Whit called to ask about the day, she told him she was meeting the florist about the lilies. It went down easily. That was the part that shamed her later - how easily it went down.

The old maternity unit was closed, and the archive had never moved with the rest. It sat below grade, past the decommissioned chapel, behind a door stenciled MATERNITY - RECORDS.

Gus Peralta had worked maintenance at St. Brigid's for thirty-one years and remembered her from the pediatric floor, when she was a young nurse with a belt full of tape. He looked at her key card, looked at her face, and shrugged.

"You're the chair," he said, unlocking. "Chair gets the basement."

Inside it smelled of wet concrete and old paper. Metal shelving. A dead wasp on the sill. Gus left her the light switch and the words "Lock up behind you," and then she was alone with seventeen years of other people's worst days.

She found the obstetrics register for the month and year. The page was ruled in faint blue. Two lines in a night nurse's small, upright hand:

DUNMORE, Claire R. - male, live - 11:04.

DUNMORE, Claire R. - male, live - 11:06.

Live. Both of them, live.

Claire stood there reading it until the letters stopped meaning anything, and then she read it again, and put her palm flat on the page as if she could feel a pulse through seventeen years of paper.

The death certificate was in a folder three shelves over. Infant Dunmore, male. Prematurity. Time of death 11:40. Signature: Vernon Pyle, M.D.

She pulled the duty roster for that night and laid it on the table beside the certificate. The on-call obstetrician was Dr. Elaine Whitcomb. Pyle was not on the ward sheet at all. His name existed in the file in exactly one place, in his own handwriting, on the paper that declared her son dead.

She took out her phone, turned off the flash, and photographed all of it. Her hands were steady the way they used to be in a delivery room, which frightened her more than shaking would have.

The last thing she found was a black clothbound book wedged behind the ward logbooks, spine cracked, no title on the outside. Inside, on the first page: Private Placement Register.

Entries in different hands, going back decades. Receiving families. Dates. Amounts. Not one of them had gone through any agency Claire had ever heard of.

Near the bottom of a page, in a hand she knew as well as her own:

Vance, D. & F. - flood district - 27th.

The signature beside it was half covered by a strip of old tape. She could see a long down-curve and one capital letter, and the capital letter was an A, and it was the A her mother made - flat on top, tail running long, the way she signed the trust disbursements and the birthday cards and the checks for the church flowers.

Claire sat down on the floor with her back against the shelf and let the cold come up through the concrete into her legs.

Then she took a picture of that too, put the book back exactly where it had been, squared to the shelf edge, and washed the dust off her hands at the old slop sink. On the roster page, one name had stayed with her from the night of 11:04 and 11:06.

A. Reyes, R.N.

Alma Reyes had taught Claire to swaddle a newborn. Alma Reyes had retired to the far side of the river eight years ago and had, as far as Claire knew, never once spoken to her since.

Driving home, Claire counted her lies. One to her mother about nothing at all. Two to her husband before noon. She had a photograph of her dead son's birth record in her pocket and a photograph of her mother's signature in her phone, and no idea yet which of them she was more afraid of.