Catherine sat, her handbag on her knees. "We are not reporters," she said. "I was told my daughter died in a fire that night. I have reason to believe she did not."
Ada's hands tightened in her lap. She said nothing.
"I am not here to threaten you," Catherine said quietly. "I am here because you may be the last person who saw my daughter alive."
"I was a nurse," Ada said at last, her voice thin. "I followed orders. That is all I can tell you."
"What orders," Nora said.
Ada looked at her, really looked at her, and Catherine watched the old woman's eyes drift to Nora's wrist, to the sleeve that covered it, and then away.
"It was the night of the fire," Ada said. "The nursery had to be evacuated. There was smoke in the corridor, everyone shouting. Dr. Lang pulled me aside and said a baby had to be moved quietly, away from the cameras, away from the paperwork."
"My daughter," Catherine whispered.
"He said she was yours," Ada said. "He said there were complications and the baby needed to go to a specialist facility, and I was not to log the transfer. I knew it was wrong. I knew it then. But he was the attending physician, and he told me your husband had arranged it."
Catherine went very still. "Theodore."
"Mr. Marlowe, yes." Ada's voice shook. "He said I was to carry the baby out through the service exit to the parking lot, where a man would be waiting. A car. I would hand her over and come back."
"Did you," Nora said, and her voice had gone flat in the way it did when she was frightened.
Ada's eyes filled. "I carried her out in a hospital blanket. I was seventy feet from the door and I could see the man by the car, and I thought, this child has no name, no bracelet, no chart, and I am about to give her to a stranger in a dark parking lot." A tear ran down her cheek. "I could not do it."
The room was silent except for a clock ticking somewhere.
"I drove instead," Ada said. "I put her in my car and drove to Saint Mary's Orphanage. I laid her on the steps in the blanket, and I rang the bell, and I hid until a sister opened the door." She pressed her fingers to her mouth. "No name. No note. I thought they would give her a better chance than whatever waited in that car."
Nora stood up abruptly and walked to the window, her back to the room. Her shoulders were trembling.
Catherine leaned forward. "Mrs. Kowalski. Ada. Do you know that baby lived? She is standing by your window. She is my daughter. You did not give her to that man, and because of you, she lived."
Ada stared at Nora, and a sound came out of her, half sob, half breath. "Twenty-three years. I have carried it for twenty-three years."
"You were ordered," Catherine said gently. "By Dr. Lang. Paid for by my husband."
"I should have gone to the police that night," Ada said. "I was afraid. Lang said the Marlowes would ruin me, and I believed him, and I stayed silent, and every Christmas I wondered where that baby was." She looked at Nora. "Can you forgive me."
Nora turned from the window. "I grew up," she said. "It was not always kind. But I grew up."
Ada wept into her hands. Catherine reached across and held her arm, steady, and for a moment the three women sat in the silence of it, twenty-three years collapsing into one small room.
Then Ada lifted her head. The guilt was still there, but something else had risen beneath it, something she had held back so long it hurt her to speak.
"Mrs. Marlowe," she said. "There is something else. Something I never told anyone."
Catherine's hand froze on the old woman's arm. "What."
"That night, in the nursery, before the alarm sounded." Ada's voice dropped to a whisper. "There were two girls."
The words landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.
"What do you mean," Catherine said.
"Two bassinettes. Side by side. Two identical babies, both with the little heart mark on the wrist." Ada was crying openly now. "Dr. Lang only gave me one to carry. He told me there was one child. Mrs. Marlowe, you did not have one daughter that night."
Nora's breath caught audibly. Catherine heard her own heartbeat in her ears, loud, impossibly loud.
"I gave birth once," Catherine said. "They told me it was a girl. One girl."
"You had twins," Ada said. "I swear it. There were two girls."
Chapter 10: Two Girls
Catherine stood at her study window long after midnight, watching the city smolder below in its grid of lights. Two girls. The words would not settle into any shape she could hold. For twenty-three years she had carried one grief, polished like the silver locket in her drawer, and now Ada Kowalski's shaking voice had split it open into something twice as large and twice as sharp.
Her phone lay on the desk. She picked it up before she could talk herself into waiting for morning.
"Susan," she said when the lawyer answered, thick with sleep. "It's Catherine. Forgive the hour."
"Forgiven." A rustle, a lamp clicking on. "Tell me."
"Nurse Ada Kowalski talked to your investigator tonight. She was on the nursery floor the night of the fire, Susan. She says I had two girls. Twins. She was ordered to hand one of them to a man in the parking lot, and she couldn't do it, so she left that baby at Saint Mary's with a blanket and no name."
Silence. Then Susan's voice came back changed, all business. "Did she sign anything?"
"Not yet. She will. You'll have a sworn statement by morning."
"Good." Papers shifting. "Then I go to court for an emergency order to unseal Dr. Lang's records. A concealed birth and a falsified death certificate. That isn't a privacy interest, Catherine. That's a crime wearing a seal."
"How long?"
"If his lawyer fights it, a week. If he doesn't, days." A pause. "Are you certain about the nurse? Old memories bend."
"She wept, Susan. Nobody weeps over a story they invented."
"I'll start drafting tonight."
"One more thing," Susan said. "The order will cover his personal files too, not just the hospital archive. If he kept a second set of records at home, hiding places count."
"He kept something," Catherine said. "Guilty men always keep something."