Chapter 8 - The Second Crib
I replayed the call six times.
Damian arrived twenty minutes later in sweatpants and a coat thrown over a T-shirt. One sock was black. The other was blue.
It was the first unpolished thing I had ever seen about him.
“You called security before me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He listened to the recording.
“The hospital did not take only one baby that night.”
Noah slept in the next room with Rosa beside him.
Damian rubbed one hand over his face. “Could be Julian trying to create confusion.”
“From jail?”
“He has people.”
“So does your father.”
He did not defend Charles.
Marcus searched the hospital records. Two women had delivered babies during the restricted time window. Me—and a sixteen-year-old girl named Lily Hart who disappeared from public records six months later.
Her baby was listed as stillborn.
The same administrator signed both files.
We drove to the administrator’s home before sunrise with detectives. Dr. Edwin Cole lived alone in a gated community and opened the door holding a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST GRANDPA.
He saw me and dropped it.
Ceramic broke across the porch.
“No lawyers yet,” Damian said. “Just tell her.”
Cole backed into the house. “I followed orders.”
“Whose?”
“Charles Sterling’s. Regina’s. It changed depending on the day.”
I showed him Noah’s photograph. “Was there another baby?”
Cole sank into a chair.
“There were two infants. Both healthy.”
“What happened to Lily Hart’s child?”
He looked at Damian.
“Your father took her too.”
“Her?”
“A girl.”
Damian’s face went still.
“Why?”
Cole began crying, which irritated me more than if he had smiled.
“Insurance. Charles said one child could die. One could fail a DNA test. He wanted leverage against multiple families.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
I leaned close. “Try harder.”
He opened a wall safe and removed an old ledger.
Payments led to a private adoption agency in Connecticut. The agency had closed three years earlier after its director drowned in a boating accident.
Marcus traced one final account to a trust managed by Regina.
The beneficiary initials were A.S.
Damian said, “Amelia Sterling.”
“Who is that?”
“My half sister. She died when she was an infant. At least that’s what I was told.”
Charles had always claimed Damian was his only surviving child.
Another buried baby. Another convenient death.
We confronted Charles at his estate after his lawyers failed to block a court order.
He sat in the library beneath a portrait of himself painted twenty years younger.
“Amelia is alive?” Damian asked.
Charles poured tea with a steady hand. “Yes.”
“Where?”
“Safe.”
“You stole her from Lily Hart.”
“I rescued her from poverty.”
I stepped forward. “You keep saying that word when you mean ownership.”
He looked at me. “And yet you accepted my townhouse.”
The jab found its target.
I hated that.
Damian said, “Where is she?”
Charles took a sip. “Ask your fiancée.”
Vanessa, from jail, agreed to speak only with me.
We met through scratched glass in a detention center interview room. Without makeup, she looked younger and meaner.
“Amelia is at St. Catherine’s Academy,” she said. “She uses the name Mia Reed.”
“How old?”
“Five.”
“You knew?”
“I knew there was a girl. I didn’t know where she came from until last year.”
“And you did nothing.”
“I was going to help her after the wedding.”
“No, you weren’t.”
She looked away.
A long silence.
Then she said, “No. I wasn’t.”
It was the first time Vanessa admitted a wrong choice without dressing it as fear.
She slid a folded note beneath the glass.
“Charles visits her every first Sunday. He calls himself her grandfather.”
I opened the note.
A photograph fell out.
A little girl with dark curls stood beside Charles Sterling in a garden.
Around her wrist was a hospital bracelet.
The name printed on it was not Amelia.
May you like
It was Emily Brooks.
