Chapter 4 - The Nurse Who Remembered Camille Crying
Harrison had been looking into the birth for three weeks before Harper found the wristband.
That revelation angered her too.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because until yesterday I could not prove the second child survived placement.”
“What changed?”
“A nurse called me.”
Her name was Margaret Doyle.
Retired now.
Seventy-four.
She had worked the maternity floor the night Harper and Elliot were born.
Harrison arranged a video call that same afternoon.
Margaret appeared on-screen with silver hair, reading glasses, and the expression of someone who had carried an old discomfort much longer than she expected.
The moment she saw Camille, her face softened.
“Oh, honey.”
Camille began crying again.
Harper noticed that her mother looked thirty years old for a second.
Not forty-five.
Young.
Frightened.
Back in a hospital bed.
Margaret remembered the twins clearly because Camille’s situation had troubled several nurses.
“She didn’t want that boy taken,” Margaret said firmly.
Harper leaned toward the screen.
“Did she sign?”
“Yes.”
“Then how do you know?”
Margaret did not evade.
“Because signing something while terrified doesn’t erase what I heard.”
She remembered Camille gripping Elliot against her chest and saying repeatedly:
Please don’t take my son.
She remembered Roland telling staff that Camille was confused by grief.
She remembered Camille asking for Harrison.
That startled him.
“Me?”
Margaret nodded.
“She asked someone to call the family attorney.”
Harrison looked toward Roland’s closed study door.
“I was never called.”
“I know,” Margaret said. “Your name was crossed off the contact sheet.”
“By whom?”
“I couldn’t prove it.”
But everyone in the room knew.
Margaret also remembered the adoptive parents.
Susan and Mark Whitaker.
They had looked nervous.
Overwhelmed.
They were told Camille had made a difficult but voluntary decision months earlier.
“That wasn’t true?” Harper asked.
“No.”
The placement had been arranged less than twenty-four hours before the birth.
Roland moved fast after Nathan’s death.
Too fast.
Then Margaret remembered one more detail.
Camille had tied a thin blue thread around Elliot’s blanket before he was taken.
A tiny knot.
“I asked her why.”
Margaret smiled sadly.
“She said, ‘So if I ever see it again, I’ll know someone kept one thing I gave him.’”
Harper looked at her mother.
“Did you ever see the blanket again?”
Camille shook her head.
“No.”
Harrison asked Margaret whether she knew where the Whitakers lived afterward.
Margaret hesitated.
“I knew where they moved first.”
Not across the country.
Not overseas.
Forty-three miles away.
Harper stared at Camille.
Fifteen years.
May you like
Forty-three miles.
The distance was suddenly unbearable.
