Chapter 6

The review was calendared for Friday at 9 a.m. in the Brayton County Children’s Services hearing room, second floor of the old courthouse annex. I had five days to build a case out of nothing.

I didn’t have a lawyer. I had an EMS salary and a shift schedule. I called legal aid. The woman on the phone was kind and overworked. She told me I needed proof of maternity, proof of the fraudulent placement, and a home study. She told me DNA would take weeks. She told me the county could move Amos again before any of it was finished.

So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I worked the system from inside.

I pulled my hospital records. I requested the facility birth register search in writing. I got a certified copy of the certificate of live birth from the county vital records office. It listed a male infant, born at Brayton Harbor Mercy, date and time. No name. No death certificate attached.

I took the card out of my wallet and photographed it beside the certificate. I wrote down the case number from Amos’s card. I called the Orphan’s Court records room and asked for the file. They told me it was sealed. I asked who had sealed it. They told me they couldn’t disclose that.

I knew who had sealed it. Verna Brannigan, deputy clerk, retired. My mother.

On Wednesday, I drove to Braithwaite County to see Amos. The shelter was a low brick building with a playground covered in snow. They wouldn’t let me past the lobby. I wasn’t on the approved list.

“I’m his mother,” I said.

The receptionist looked at her screen. “You’re not listed.”

I sat in the lobby for two hours anyway. I didn’t see him. I didn’t know if he knew I had come.

That night, Verna called me.

“You’re making a mistake,” she said. “The county will put him with strangers. Fern is dying. If you push this, he loses everyone.”

“He already lost me.”

“You lost him. That’s different.”

I hung up. I sat in the dark and listened to Junie breathe in the next room.

The next morning, I went to Verna’s house while she was at church. I had a key from when I was fifteen. I told myself I was only looking.

The kitchen drawer was full of rubber-banded money-order stubs. I counted them in stacks. Four hundred dollars each. Monthly. Nine years. One hundred eight stubs.

Verna had been paying Fern since before Amos could walk. She had been buying silence with money orders and a notary stamp.

I took three. I didn’t know what else to do.

Verna came home while I was still at the drawer.

She stood in the kitchen doorway with her church coat on. She didn’t shout. She looked at the stubs in my hand, then at my face.

“You’re going to destroy this family,” she said.

“You already did.”

She took out her phone and called Dev. I heard her tell him there was an open investigation touching Junie’s household.

When I got home, my ex-husband was parked in my driveway.