Chapter 2 - A Child Who Remembered Nothing
Vincent read Camille's name a third time before he spoke.
"Why would my fiancée request those records?"
I stayed on the floor, collecting the last things from my bag. My hands were shaking badly enough that I couldn't close the zipper.
"That's what I've been trying to find out."
"You're telling me you suspected my mother stole your baby and you accepted a job in his nursery?"
"I accepted a job where I could see whether I was wrong."
"He isn't evidence, Maya. He's a child."
"I know that better than you think."
The words came out too sharply. Vincent had raised Leo through fevers, scraped knees, and nightmares. I had known him only as a warm weight against my chest for a few minutes after delivery, then as an empty crib in a recovery room. The loss didn't cancel his years. His years didn't cancel mine.
"You're right," I said. "I crossed a line. I was terrified that if I said his name out loud, he'd disappear a second time."
Vincent folded the report into careful quarters. "Who told you he died?"
"A woman who introduced herself as your mother's representative. She said the nursery had sent him to intensive care. Then she came back without him."
"You never saw a death certificate?"
"I saw a photocopy of a hospital summary. I was twenty-three, recovering from an emergency delivery, and alone. The nurse who had helped me on admission was gone. They wouldn't let me into the nursery."
He frowned. "Why alone?"
"My mother had died the year before. You were the father, but after your father ordered me out of your office, your number stopped working."
Vincent turned toward the window. Seven years earlier, I'd worked as a graduate intern at one of his development sites. We had spent four months together, quietly, imperfectly, foolish enough to believe we could solve the difference between his world and mine later. When I became pregnant, he had been overseas. I had left messages that never reached him.
"I was told you'd taken a settlement," he said. "That you didn't want him."
"Did you see me sign anything?"
"No. My mother brought me a notarized document. I believed it."
"And you never called me yourself?"
He didn't answer. Silence was answer enough.
Inside the apartment, a toy struck the floor. Leo was still upset. Vincent looked toward the sound, and for one second I saw a father who wanted nothing more than to go comfort his son.
"Go to him," I said. "I'm not going to make him watch us fight."
"You can't come back to work tomorrow."
A small, hard ache opened beneath my ribs. "I figured."
"That's not the same as saying you can never see him again. I need to know what's true first."
He handed me the laboratory page, then hesitated. "My lawyer will contact you. Don't approach Leo at school. Don't contact him through anyone on my staff."
"I won't."
He studied me as though trying to recognize someone from an old photograph. "Did you keep anything from the hospital?"
"A blue admission bracelet. A discharge sheet. A blanket with a crooked red-car stitch."
He looked down toward the little toy car near my shoe. It had been a gift from me, bought at a drugstore after Leo refused three expensive remote-control trucks. He liked that its wheels squeaked. He called it a car that made its own decisions.
"My mother says she found Leo abandoned at a private clinic," Vincent said. "There was no mention of you being the mother."
"That's because she didn't want there to be."
The front door opened. Camille stood in the doorway, holding Leo's blue sweater by one shoulder. The boy had apparently gone to his room.
"Vincent, she's still here?"
He raised the report. "Why did you request the hospital file?"
Camille looked first at me, then at the paper. "I was doing a background check. The nanny had suspicious gaps in her employment."
"It was ten months ago," he said. "Before she started work."
"I was protecting you."
"From what?"
She stepped closer, forcing a laugh. "From exactly this. A woman who wants to exploit your attachment to that boy."
Vincent didn't move. "You knew she was his biological mother when you hired her?"
"No," Camille said too quickly.
Then she added, "And even if she was, she's the one who walked away."
My stomach turned. I had told nobody in the Bellini household about the false death notice. But Camille had known what argument to make from the first minute.
"Show me the background check," Vincent said.
"I destroyed it."
"Then we'll start with the hospital."
Camille's gaze sharpened, and I understood that this wasn't merely a jealous woman's terrible accusation. Someone had been waiting for the subject to surface. Someone had prepared a version of my life in which every door closed before I reached it.
That evening Vincent's lawyer called the hospital records department. The department confirmed it had a file under my name.
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The infant's discharge destination, however, had been changed twice.
The second change was entered forty-eight hours after a document recorded me as deceased.
