Chapter 2

The woman at the records window had a name tag that said DOREEN and the flat patience of someone who had worked Saturdays for twenty years. I told her I needed my own patient records. Then I told her I needed a search of vital records for a birth and a death at this hospital nine years ago.

“You can request your own records,” she said. “Vital records are county. We can give you a facility birth register search if you have the date and time.”

I gave her the date. I gave her 3:41 a.m.

I did not say it was my son.

Doreen typed. The printer behind her whined. She frowned at the screen, then at me.

“You said death record?”

“Yes.”

She clicked. Clicked again. “There’s a certificate of live birth filed for that minute. Male infant. Brayton Harbor Mercy.” She looked up. “I’m not seeing a death certificate in the state registry. That would be county vital records, but our discharge register usually reflects it. There’s no discharge listed as expired.”

The floor did not move. The lights did not flicker. But something in me sat down hard.

“No death certificate,” I repeated.

“Not in what I can access,” she said. “You’d have to confirm with the county. But if a death had been filed, we’d have a cross-reference.”

I had grieved a living child for nine years. The thought arrived whole and ugly, and I could not make it smaller.

I asked for my own ICU admission record from that stay. That took longer. She printed eleven pages. Sedation. Septic shock. Non-responsive periods. A morphine drip. Date of consent? There was no consent in the packet. Just my signature on discharge paperwork I had never seen.

“Thank you,” I said.

Doreen watched me. “You okay, honey?”

“I’m a paramedic,” I said, like that meant something.

She didn’t smile. “That’s not an answer.”

I took the papers to my truck. I sat under the sodium light in the hospital lot and read the first page three times. Live birth. No death. The five-digit case number on Amos’s card was a real county case number. I typed it into my phone. I couldn’t access the sealed Orphan’s Court file, but the format was wrong for a birth record. It was a placement number.

Fern Lattimore lived three miles from my house. My mother had told me she was in Florida.

At eleven that night I parked on Harbor Street above the shuttered bait shop. The ground-floor apartment had one light on behind a sheet curtain. A portable oxygen concentrator hummed near the door.

I knocked.

Fern opened it in a flannel shirt and work pants. She was smaller than I remembered, gray-faced, with a cannula under her nose. She looked at me and did not pretend to be surprised.

“Halle,” she said.

“You’re supposed to be in Florida.”

“I’m supposed to be a lot of things.” She didn’t move aside.

I held up my phone. The photograph of the two cards filled the screen.

Fern looked at it. Her jaw worked. For a second she looked old enough to die.

“He’s my grand-nephew,” she said. “I’ve raised him since he was three months old.”

“Where did you get him?”

“Go ask your mother what she did with the paperwork.”

She closed the door.