Chapter 4: The Name Michael Never Mentioned
I stared at the message for a long time.
Diane was watching me.
"What's wrong?"
"I don't know yet." I turned the phone face-down on my knee.
"Rest.
I'll be just outside."
I stepped into the hallway.
The nurse at the station looked up briefly, then back at her screen.
Lucy's bassinet had been moved inside with Diane.
The corridor was quiet, the kind of quiet that only exists in hospitals at four in the morning.
I looked at the message again.
*Do not trust what Michael told you about the clinic.*
I typed back: *Who is this?*
The reply came in under a minute: *My name is Robert Finch.
I was the director of Lakeview Fertility Associates from 1998 to 2006.
I've been waiting for this night for a long time.
Can we meet?*
I leaned against the wall.
A clinic director.
Reaching out at four in the morning, the same night the lab report surfaced, the same night Diane walked through that door.
That was not a coincidence.
I typed: *How did you get this number?*
*Michael gave it to me.
Four years ago, when I first contacted him.
He asked me to stay quiet.
I agreed.
I shouldn't have.*
I put the phone in my pocket and walked to the waiting room.
Michael was sitting in the far corner, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor.
He looked up when I came in.
Something in his face — relief, maybe, that I'd come back — shifted when he saw my expression.
"Who is Robert Finch?" I said.
The relief disappeared.
"Carol—"
"Who is he, Michael?"
He pressed his lips together.
"He ran the clinic."
"I know that.
He just texted me.
He says you asked him to stay quiet four years ago." I sat down across from him, not beside him.
"What exactly did he agree to stay quiet about?"
Michael rubbed the back of his neck.
"It's complicated."
"Then uncomplicate it."
He was quiet for a moment.
In the hallway outside, a cart rolled past.
Somewhere deeper in the hospital, a door opened and closed.
"When Finch contacted me," Michael said slowly, "he told me there had been a series of unauthorized transfers at the clinic.
Not just yours.
Multiple women.
He said the person responsible had covered their tracks but that records still existed in an offsite archive." He paused.
"He said if those records became public, there would be lawsuits.
Criminal exposure.
He wanted to know if I intended to pursue it."
"And you said no."
He didn't answer.
"Michael.
You said no."
"I said I needed time to think."
"And then you thought for four years and said nothing to me."
"I was trying to protect you."
The words landed and I let them sit there between us for a moment, in the fluorescent light, in the plastic chairs, in the four-in-the-morning silence of a hospital waiting room.
"You were trying to protect yourself," I said.
"From having to explain why you knew and didn't tell me.
Those are different things."
He flinched.
"Both.
It was both."
"Who was responsible?
At the clinic.
Who did the unauthorized transfers?"
He hesitated just a half-second too long.
"Michael."
"A doctor named Harlan Voss." He said it quietly, like a name he'd hoped never to say out loud.
"He was the lead embryologist.
He retired in 2005.
Finch said he'd moved out of state."
"Is he still alive?"
"As far as I know."
I stood up.
"I'm going to meet with Finch."
Michael stood too.
"Carol, wait.
You don't know this man.
You don't know what he wants."
"He wants to tell the truth.
Which is more than I can say for you right now."
"He could have an agenda.
He could be trying to—"
"To what?
Tell me that my eggs were used without my consent to create a child I never knew about, who just walked into a hospital room tonight holding a piece of paper with my name on it?" I picked up my bag from the chair.
"What agenda could possibly make that worse?"
He had no answer.
I walked back toward Diane's room.
Through the small window I could see her asleep, finally, Lucy in the bassinet beside her.
Both of them breathing slowly.
I stood there for a moment.
Twenty-two years ago, something had been taken from me without my knowledge.
A part of me, used and discarded and hidden.
And somewhere in that same act, a life had been made.
A young woman who had grown up feeling like a question without an answer.
Who had spent the last three months trying to find me.
Who had walked into a hospital room in pain, barely hours after giving birth, because she needed me to know.
I texted Finch: *Tomorrow morning.
You choose the place.
Come alone.*
His reply was immediate: *There's something else you need to know before we meet.
Harlan Voss didn't act alone.
And the other person involved — you've met them.
Recently.*
I read the message three times.
Recently.
I thought about the room I'd just been in.
The doctor.
The security officers.
The lab report handed across a desk.
Then I thought about Michael.
About the paperwork he'd said was already done.
About how quickly the hospital had called him.
About how he'd known exactly which ward to wait at, exactly which door to stand beside, exactly when to place a baby in my arms.
My hands were very still.
I typed: *Tell me the name.*
He typed back: *Not by text.
May you like
Tomorrow.
And Carol — don't let Michael make any calls tonight.*
