Chapter 11 - The Third Mother
If neither Margaret nor Caroline gave birth to Ethan, then thirty-five years of assumptions were wrong.
We returned to the original Hawthorne records.
Seventeen pregnant women.
That was the meaning of Bennett Seventeen.
Caroline had been witness number seventeen in a protected maternity group.
Not patient B-17.
The B stood for Baby.
Baby 17.
Ethan.
The clinic intentionally separated maternal identities from infant codes.
A security measure.
The mapping ledger was missing.
Then Susan confessed she had seen it once.
“Whose name was beside B-17?”
She didn’t remember.
Or claimed not to.
Caroline exploded.
“You remember everything.”
Susan shouted back:
“I was nineteen!”
There it was.
Susan had been at Hawthorne too.
Not as Caroline’s visiting sister.
As a patient.
My mother had been pregnant at nineteen.
I stared at her.
“What?”
She began shaking.
Before meeting my father, Susan became pregnant.
The father left.
Her conservative parents sent her away.
Caroline, already involved with Hawthorne, arranged a confidential placement.
Susan gave birth.
She was told the baby died from complications.
Then four years later, she married my father.
Years after that, she had me.
Ethan looked at her.
No one spoke.
Susan whispered:
“No.”
He was thirty-five.
Her first child would be thirty-five.
“Mom…”
“I don't know.”
We tested.
No speculation.
No declarations.
The results came back two days later.
Susan Bennett was Ethan’s biological mother.
My mother.
I sat staring at the report until the letters blurred.
Ethan was my mother’s son.
My half-brother.
My husband.
The room seemed to disappear.
Then the laboratory director called.
There was a problem.
The report we had received through the online portal was not the report the laboratory issued.
Someone had altered it after release.
I nearly collapsed.
“What?”
The authentic report arrived through counsel.
Susan Bennett:
Excluded as biological mother.
Ethan and I were not siblings.
Someone had deliberately tried to make us believe we were.
That was no family misunderstanding.
That was sabotage.
For the first time, an active person was manipulating the investigation now.
Not thirty-five years ago.
Ethan whispered:
“Who had access?”
The portal breach came from an account belonging to the Harper Family Trust.
Margaret went pale.
“I closed that account after Robert died.”
Apparently not.
Someone had logged in that morning.
Username:
RHarper.
Robert Harper.
A dead man’s account.
Then Caroline whispered:
“Robert isn't dead.”
Margaret stared at her.
“I buried him.”
Caroline looked at me.
May you like
“No.”
“You buried the man Robert asked you to identify.”
