Chapter 6 - The Dead Baby Had the Wrong Blanket
The next clue came from something almost embarrassingly ordinary.
A blanket.
Hannah Mercer, Elena’s younger sister, arrived after Grant called.
She knew nothing about Ethan.
Nothing about Ruth’s document.
Grant asked her to remember the hospital night.
Not conclusions.
Objects.
Hannah cried while trying.
Then she remembered the receiving blanket.
Before the birth, Elena had packed two.
One white.
One pale blue with a tiny hand-stitched dark-blue line along one corner.
Elena stitched the line herself because she complained that every hospital blanket looked identical.
Grant remembered too.
He had teased her.
“Labeling the baby before he arrives?”
She laughed.
“Labeling everything around him.”
After the death, Grant was never allowed to hold his son for long.
He had been in shock.
The infant was wrapped.
A nurse eventually took the baby away.
“What blanket?” Hannah asked.
Grant closed his eyes.
White.
He remembered white.
Maybe hospital-issued.
Maybe memory.
Nothing reliable.
Then Ruth spoke.
“The blue blanket came home with the hospital things.”
Everyone turned.
“What?”
Ruth looked stunned by her own memory.
“I packed Elena’s belongings after they were returned. The blue blanket wasn’t with them.”
“Then how do you know it came home?”
“No—I mean it didn’t.”
She corrected herself.
“Sorry. I expected it. It was missing.”
The confusion mattered.
Nobody wanted memory turned into proof.
Grant’s attorney requested access to Ethan’s earliest foster-property inventory through proper channels.
Two days later, they received a description.
Among the items transferred with Baby Boy Hale:
One pale blue infant blanket with dark-blue hand stitching on corner.
Grant sat down.
Hannah covered her mouth.
Ruth started crying.
Still not absolute proof.
A blanket could move.
Hospital staff could make mistakes.
But the old transfer code and the blanket now pointed in the same direction.
Grant looked at Celeste.
She had stopped denying that something went wrong.
Now she changed tactics.
“You don’t know what happened.”
“Then tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
Her voice cracked.
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“Because I fixed something I thought was already too late to fix.”
That sentence opened the real secret.
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