Chapter 11 - No Reunification
Harris asked for five minutes alone.
Nia refused.
“You’ve had seventeen years alone with this.”
He accepted that.
The meeting minutes lay in the center of the conference table.
Maya pointed to the handwritten sentence.
“Physician supports no reunification.”
“I never said that.”
“Your name is beside it.”
“My name has been beside a lot of things lately.”
Mr. Mitchell studied Harris carefully.
“Where were you on April ninth?”
Harris looked toward the ceiling, searching memory.
“I was working nights.”
“You’re sure?”
“No.”
Maya gave a bitter laugh.
Nia interrupted.
“We verify. We don’t guess.”
Samuel Cho had already left, but he had provided archived staffing rosters.
Nia’s investigator searched them.
On April 9, 2009, Harris had been scheduled in St. Gabriel’s emergency department from 7 p.m. until 7 a.m.
The meeting had occurred at 2 p.m.
“That helps,” Jordan said.
“Not enough,” Nia replied. “Schedules change.”
Harris pulled out his phone.
“I can request training logs from the residency program.”
“You don’t contact the hospital directly,” Nia said. “Send me the information.”
Maya stared at the minutes.
“What would ‘no reunification’ even mean?”
Harris answered reluctantly.
“By April, Renee had physical custody. If Legal had decided the placement would remain, they may have wanted medical justification for avoiding disruption.”
Jordan frowned.
“You mean they needed somebody to say returning a one-month-old baby to her parents would hurt her?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Mitchell recoiled.
“She was ours.”
Harris looked at her.
“I know.”
“Stop saying that.”
He fell silent.
Nia read further.
“There’s a reference here to ‘maternal instability.’”
Mrs. Mitchell went still.
Mr. Mitchell said, “They used your postpartum records.”
Her face changed.
“What records?”
Harris looked uncomfortable.
“After the hemorrhage, you had acute anxiety. You were referred to psychiatry.”
“I had just been told my daughter died.”
“I know.”
“They made grief into evidence against me?”
No one answered.
Mrs. Mitchell stood and walked to the window.
Jordan followed.
“Mom.”
She shook her head.
“Don’t comfort me yet.”
He stopped.
She stared through the glass.
“I spent years embarrassed that I had fallen apart.”
“You were grieving.”
“I thought something in me had failed.”
Her voice trembled.
“And they wrote it down like a weapon.”
Maya watched her.
Something shifted in her expression.
Not forgiveness.
Recognition.
Nia returned to the documents.
“We need the underlying social-work report.”
Harris spoke.
“There may be another problem.”
Everyone turned.
“What?” Jordan asked.
“Renee was told the biological mother was incapable of caring for a second infant.”
Maya’s face tightened.
“Who told her?”
“A social worker named Deborah Pike.”
Nia typed the name.
“Still alive?”
“I believe so.”
The investigator searched.
Deborah Pike had retired to North Carolina in 2015.
Nia made a note.
“We contact her through counsel.”
That evening Maya returned to Claire’s home.
She finally opened one of Mrs. Mitchell’s birthday letters.
The 2009 envelope.
The paper smelled faintly old.
My baby girl,
Today you would be one.
Your brother tried cake for the first time and hated the frosting. I wondered whether you would hate it too.
Sometimes I imagine there was a mistake.
Then I hate myself for imagining it, because hope feels like betraying grief.
I do not know where to put the love I still have for you.
So I am putting it here.
Maya stopped reading.
Claire sat across the room.
“You okay?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to take it?”
“No.”
Maya continued.
If there is any impossible world in which you are alive, I hope somebody is holding you when you cry.
Maya lowered the letter.
Renee had held her.
Every night.
Every fever.
Every nightmare.
Two women had loved the same child without knowing how much the other existed.
She began crying quietly.
Claire moved beside her.
Maya leaned against her aunt.
“I don’t know who I’m supposed to be angry at.”
“You can be angry at everyone.”
“That seems exhausting.”
“It probably is.”
Maya laughed through tears.
Her phone rang.
Jordan.
She answered.
“Hey.”
His voice was tense.
“You need to see something.”
“What?”
“Nia found Harris’s residency archive.”
Maya sat upright.
“And?”
“He wasn’t at the April meeting.”
Relief came unexpectedly.
“So the minutes were forged too?”
“Probably.”
“Why are you calling like that?”
Jordan was silent.
“Because there’s another name in the real attendance log.”
Maya’s chest tightened.
“Whose?”
Jordan breathed out.
“My grandfather.”
Maya frowned.
“Your father’s father?”
“Yes.”
She had seen Walter Mitchell in old photographs. He had died when Jordan was ten.
“Why would he be at a hospital legal meeting?”
Jordan answered quietly.
“That’s what nobody knows.”
Then he sent her the page.
Beside WALTER MITCHELL was a handwritten notation:
Family representative.
Supports closure.
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Maya stared at the words.
The hospital conspiracy had just crossed another generation.
