Chapter 9 - Dr. Morgan’s jacket
The jacket was Elias’s.
He had lost it three weeks earlier at Harbor Regional.
He assumed someone stole it from the physicians’ lounge.
Hospital security showed who.
A maternity nurse.
The same nurse who later handed Caleb my phone in the clear evidence pouch.
Her name was Julia Mercer.
She had appeared compassionate.
Helpful.
Almost invisible.
Detective Cole searched her financial records.
Vale had paid her $74,000 through a consulting company.
Julia had accessed my medical chart repeatedly.
She supplied Lorraine with private pregnancy information—but not because Lorraine hired her.
Vale ordered her to make it look that way.
She stole Elias’s jacket.
Planted it.
Manipulated callback records.
And had access to medications.
Suddenly the entire story changed.
Lorraine had interfered.
But some of the worst evidence against her had been manufactured around real mistakes she had made.
Perfect framing.
Use a guilty person to hide a guiltier one.
Julia disappeared before police could arrest her.
Her apartment had been emptied.
Then a hospital employee found something inside her locker.
A photograph.
Caleb as a child.
Lorraine.
Charles.
And Julia.
She wasn't merely Vale’s employee.
She had known the Rowan family for decades.
Lorraine saw the photograph and began crying.
“Julia Vale.”
Richard Vale’s daughter.
Different surname after marriage.
A nurse positioned inside the hospital treating both Rowan pregnancies.
Richard had embedded his own daughter into the medical side of the succession scheme.
Then Detective Cole discovered something stranger.
Julia had not fled the state.
She had entered the NICU using another employee’s badge.
My daughter was still there.
Caleb and I ran.
Security locked the unit.
Grace was safe.
Julia was gone.
But something had been left beneath her incubator.
A sealed envelope.
Inside:
A DNA report.
Caleb opened it.
His face changed.
“What?”
He handed it to me.
Paternity probability:
0%.
For one horrifying second, neither of us breathed.
“That’s impossible.”
Caleb looked at me.
I saw the old suspicion trying to return.
Then he destroyed it himself.
“No.”
He tore the report in half.
“I’m not doing this again.”
That mattered more than he knew.
Detective Cole examined the report.
The laboratory was legitimate.
The sample identifiers were not.
The DNA wasn't Grace’s.
It belonged to another baby.
But why leave it beneath her incubator?
Then the NICU physician checked Grace’s identification records.
Her ankle band was correct.
Her electronic tag was correct.
Yet her newborn blood sample had disappeared from the lab.
Someone wasn't merely trying to falsify paternity.
May you like
Someone needed Grace’s actual DNA.
And Julia had taken it.
