Chapter 5 - PARAGRAPH SEVENTEEN
Paragraph seventeen had not been separately initialed, despite the drafting attorney recommending that it should be. Naomi found the email chain. Attorney Evelyn Shaw: Paragraph 17 should be separately initialed given scope. Michael: She’ll overthink it. Evelyn: Then explain it. Michael: Just include it in the package. Evelyn replied: I will not represent that she gave informed consent if challenged. Michael had known exactly what he was hiding. Then David’s anonymous hospital payment became another problem. Why did he know Michael had canceled my supplemental executive coverage before I knew? Because someone inside the Reed family had warned him. Michael’s older sister, Caroline. I had met Caroline once at our wedding. She had left the family business years earlier and lived in London. David said she contacted him three months ago because she had been tracking irregularities at St. Arden. “Why would she care about my pregnancy?” David looked away. “Because she went through something similar.”
Caroline had been pregnant at twenty-eight. She lost the baby at thirty-one weeks. During the emergency, the Reed family office controlled hospital decisions. She later discovered fetal tissue had been enrolled in a genomics research program through a broad consent she did not understand. That broke her relationship with the family. Then David said something even harder. “The baby was mine.” Caroline and David had been engaged. So David’s interest in St. Arden was not merely corporate. It was grief. Guilt. And a lawsuit. Then an internal St. Arden memo surfaced: HIGH-RISK REED TRIPLET CASE — POTENTIAL NEONATAL GENOMICS COHORT PENDING GUARDIAN CONSENT. No patient name, but the gestational dates matched me. Rebecca had requested information about the research program before anyone had my consent. Naomi immediately filed to prohibit nonclinical research enrollment without my explicit authorization. Then Michael called. “Lena, come home. We can fix this.” I laughed. He said, “David Kane doesn’t care about you.”
Maybe true. Then: “Ask him about Caroline.” I looked at David. Michael hung up. And for the first time, the man who had defended me in the lobby looked afraid—not of Michael, but of what Caroline might tell me about him.
