Chapter 8 - The Names in the Notebook
The black notebook contained forty-one names.
Not forty-one stolen children.
The truth was more complicated.
Some women had chosen adoption and remained satisfied with the decision.
Some had requested confidentiality and did not want anyone reopening their lives.
Some adult adoptees wanted records.
Others did not.
Mara had written one warning across the inside cover:
Do not turn people into evidence because you want a scandal to be simple.
Gideon read that sentence to the independent review team.
They built the investigation around consent.
No public list.
No press dump.
No dramatic reunion campaign.
Each person would be contacted through trauma-informed legal services where lawful and appropriate.
The first person who agreed to speak publicly was Rachel Wynn.
Forty-two.
Teacher.
Married.
Two children.
Her St. Orla file said her biological mother, Angela Pierce, voluntarily surrendered her after counseling.
Angela's surviving letters said otherwise.
She had asked for three days to speak to her sister.
St. Orla staff moved Rachel to an adoptive home that afternoon.
The surrender form was signed after Angela received a sedative for postpartum complications.
Rachel sat across from Gideon in a solicitor's conference room.
"I love my parents," she said immediately.
"I understand."
"Do you?"
"Probably not enough."
"Good answer."
She looked at the file.
"If this becomes a story about babies stolen by monsters, people like me get told our whole families are fake."
Gideon nodded.
"What do you want?"
"The truth about the process. Not a replacement childhood."
That became the review's guiding principle.
Corinne hated it for a different reason.
If no one sensationalized the cases, she could not dismiss the investigation as a media witch hunt.
Records remained.
The current criminal exposure centered less on thirty-year-old adoptions and more on what Corinne and Vane had done recently.
Evidence destruction order.
Unauthorized room entry.
Coordination with Lucinda.
Threats to Mara.
Possible data offenses.
Possibly forged historical records where limitation rules allowed action.
Then Naomi found a current financial trail.
St. Orla had closed fourteen years ago, but a restricted account remained.
The St. Orla Legacy Care Fund.
Publicly, it paid counseling for former residents.
Privately, payments had gone to Vane's clinic and Corinne's consultants.
Not millions.
Hundreds of thousands over a decade.
Some invoices were legitimate.
Others were vague.
"Historical advisory."
"Confidential family liaison."
"Records sensitivity management."
Lucinda's twenty-five-thousand-pound payment came from the same fund.
Gideon stared at the ledger.
"They used a care fund to pay someone to humiliate Sage."
Naomi nodded.
That was provable.
Not ancient.
Not ambiguous.
Current money.
Current act.
Then the review team found something even more personal.
A payment six years earlier.
Private investigator.
Subject initials:
M.E. + child.
Mara and Sage had been watched since Sage was a baby.
The authorization line did not belong to Corinne.
It belonged to Gideon's late father, Frederick Kessler.
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