PART 5: THE SECOND CHILD
“You spent all night trying to save your father’s company,” Grant said as the agents dragged him away. “But while you were doing that, someone took your son.”
I ran after him.
“Where is he?”
Grant looked over his shoulder and smiled. “Ask my mother.”
The agents pushed him into the waiting vehicle.
I called St. Catherine’s Hospital again as Daniel drove me there. The nurse explained that Melissa had signed discharge papers only forty minutes after giving birth.
“That isn’t possible,” I said. “She could barely stand.”
“She didn’t leave alone,” the nurse replied. “A woman wearing an administrative badge escorted her through the private elevator.”
“Was it Evelyn Shaw?”
“The woman had dark hair. Her badge identified her as Olivia Hale.”
My hand tightened around the phone.

Someone had entered the hospital pretending to be me.
When we arrived, federal agents had already sealed Melissa’s room and the maternity floor. A frightened nurse showed us the discharge authorization.
My signature appeared at the bottom.
It was another forgery.
“Whoever took them knew the hospital’s procedures,” Daniel said. “They knew which elevator avoided the main lobby and which forms would prevent the infant alarm from activating.”
“They also had access to my identification.”
The lead agent approached us with a tablet. “We recovered security footage from the parking garage.”
The video showed Melissa sitting in a wheelchair with the newborn against her chest. Her face was pale, and her hospital gown was visible beneath a hastily buttoned coat.
A woman in medical scrubs pushed the wheelchair.
Her face was hidden by a mask and surgical cap, but she walked with calm confidence.
A black van waited beside the elevator.
As the woman helped Melissa inside, Melissa turned toward the security camera and lifted one hand.
She pointed three times toward the left pocket of her coat.
“She was trying to tell us something,” I said.
We searched the hospital room.
Melissa’s clothing, purse, and shoes were gone, but her phone remained beneath the bed. Its screen was cracked, and the last message had never been sent.
It was addressed to me.
OLIVIA, I KNOW THE BABY IS YOURS. I DIDN’T KNOW UNTIL EVELYN CAME INTO MY ROOM. THEY ARE TAKING US TO THE PLACE WHERE NORTHSTAR FIRST TOUCHED THE WATER. PLEASE FIND HIM.

“The place where Northstar first touched the water,” Daniel repeated.
I knew exactly what she meant.
My father’s original laboratory stood on the southern edge of Lake Union. It had been abandoned after Northstar moved into its corporate headquarters twenty-two years earlier.
When I was a child, my father called it the place where Northstar touched the water.
The lead agent contacted the tactical team.
I called Lena.
“Search every payment connected to the old laboratory,” I told her. “Vehicles, security, electricity—anything.”
Her keyboard clicked rapidly.
“The property has been inactive for years,” she said. “Wait. A maintenance company reactivated the electricity six months ago.”
“Who paid them?”
“Orison Advisory.”
Evelyn’s secret company.
The black van had disappeared from traffic cameras less than a mile from the waterfront.
We reached the abandoned laboratory twenty minutes later.
The building’s faded Northstar symbol was barely visible through the fog. Most of the windows were boarded, but light escaped from a narrow basement window.
Agents surrounded the property.
A baby began crying inside.
Every instinct in my body told me to run toward that sound, but the lead agent caught my arm.
“You remain behind us.”
“That is my child.”

“And we are going to bring him out safely.”
Two agents broke the side entrance while another team entered through the loading dock.
We followed them down a corridor filled with dusty equipment and overturned filing cabinets. The baby’s cries grew louder.
A woman shouted from behind a locked laboratory door.
“Please! He needs a doctor!”
It was Melissa.
The agents forced the door open.
Melissa sat on the floor with the newborn wrapped inside her coat. A bruise darkened one side of her face, and a plastic restraint circled her wrist.
Beside her stood Eleanor Shaw.
She held a gun.
“Put it down!” the agents shouted.
Eleanor immediately placed the weapon on the floor and raised both hands.
“I took it from the driver,” she said. “If I intended to hurt them, you wouldn’t have found us.”
I rushed to Melissa.
The baby’s face was red from crying, but he was breathing. A paramedic examined him while I knelt beside them.
“What happened?” I asked.
Melissa began to cry.
“The woman who came into my room said you had ordered my arrest. She showed me a message from Grant claiming you knew about the embryo and wanted me charged with stealing your child.”
“I never sent anyone.”
“I know that now. She told me I had one chance to leave before the police arrived. I was terrified, and I could barely think.”
“Who was she?”
“I never saw her face. She wore a mask the entire time.”
Eleanor stepped closer.
“I followed the van from the hospital,” she said. “The driver was one of Evelyn’s private security contractors. When he stopped here, I confronted him.”
“Why were you still near the hospital?” Daniel demanded.
“Because I knew Evelyn would have a contingency plan. Grant was too valuable to her, but the baby was even more valuable.”
“Why?”
Eleanor looked at me. “Because your father’s trust passes to your biological children if anything happens to you.”
A chill traveled through me.
Evelyn had not taken the child only to hide evidence of the stolen embryo.
She had taken him because he was the future owner of Northstar.
“Where is the driver?” the lead agent asked.
“He escaped through the loading dock before I could stop him.”
The agents searched the building while paramedics lifted Melissa onto a stretcher.
She reached for my hand.
“Olivia, I’m sorry.”

I looked at her.
This woman had slept with my husband, helped him hide an affair, and carried a child created from an embryo stolen from my body.
“I believed Grant when he said your marriage was over,” she continued. “He told me you had agreed to use a donor embryo because you didn’t want to be pregnant. I knew the company was paying my expenses, but I thought it was his money. I didn’t know he had stolen the embryo until Evelyn showed me the original number.”
“You still knew he was married.”
Melissa lowered her eyes. “Yes.”
“I cannot forgive that today.”
“I understand.”
“But you protected my child when you could barely protect yourself.”
She looked down at the baby.
“When Evelyn threatened him, nothing else mattered.”
The paramedic placed the newborn into a portable bassinet. As they prepared to carry him out, I touched his tiny hand.
His fingers closed around mine.
I had spent years grieving children I believed I would never have. I had blamed my body, apologized to Grant, and sat silently while he told me my failure had destroyed his dream of becoming a father.
But my body had not failed.
My husband had stolen my chance to become a mother and placed my child inside another woman.
The baby opened his eyes.
For one quiet second, the abandoned laboratory, the armed agents, the company, and the betrayal all disappeared.
“Hello,” I whispered. “I’m Olivia.”
Melissa watched me from the stretcher.
“You’re his mother,” she said.
At the hospital, doctors confirmed that the newborn had not been harmed. Melissa required treatment for blood loss and the blow to her face, but she was stable.
With Melissa’s written consent and the court’s emergency authorization, a genetic test was performed.
The results arrived six hours later.
Probability of maternity: 99.99%.
The doctor placed the paper in my hands.
“He is your biological son,” she said.

I looked through the nursery glass at the child sleeping beneath a blue blanket.
Daniel stood beside me. “Grant can no longer deny what he did.”
“He will try.”
“He can try from a jail cell.”
The federal investigators had recovered enough evidence from Grant’s laptop to charge him with fraud, embezzlement, identity theft, evidence tampering, and conspiracy. The recording from my father’s study had also reopened the investigation into his death.
Evelyn remained in custody in Seattle.
Grant refused to answer questions.
Eleanor claimed she had rescued Melissa to correct the harm she helped cause. The investigators took her statement but did not arrest her immediately because she had surrendered the weapon, preserved evidence, and led them to Orison’s financial records.
Still, my father’s warning remained in my mind.
One of these women will kill me.
Evelyn’s voice and Grant’s voice were on the recording, but I had learned that hearing part of the truth could be more dangerous than believing a complete lie.
That evening, Lena arrived at the hospital carrying her laptop.
“We found the remaining embryo records,” she said.
I closed the nursery door behind us. “My father said two were destroyed and two were unaccounted for.”
“The destruction records were real. But one of the missing embryos wasn’t missing.”
She showed me a document from Carrow Fertility Institute.
Embryo OC-GH-04 had been transferred out of storage twenty-eight months earlier.

“Who received it?”
“The patient’s identity was hidden under a medical privacy shell. The procedure was paid for by the Evelyn Shaw Children’s Foundation.”
“Was the implantation successful?”
Lena opened a second file.
“Yes.”
I felt the air leave my lungs.
“A child was born?”
“A girl. She would be almost two years old now.”
I stared through the glass at my newborn son.
Grant had not stolen one embryo.
He had stolen two.
“Where is she?”
“The birth certificate was sealed. But Evelyn’s foundation made monthly payments to a private guardian.”
Lena displayed a photograph taken at a Northstar charity gala seven months earlier.
Evelyn stood beside a little girl wearing a red dress. The child had dark curls, gray-blue eyes, and the same crescent-shaped birthmark that appeared on every woman in my father’s family.
The caption identified her as Grace, Evelyn Shaw’s goddaughter.
I touched the child’s face on the screen.
“She looks like me.”
“There’s something else,” Lena said.
The guardian’s identity had been changed that morning, minutes before Grant called me from my father’s study.
“To whom?”
Lena turned the laptop toward me.
The new guardian was Eleanor Shaw.
I immediately called the agents assigned to watch Eleanor.
No one answered.
Then a message appeared on my phone from an unknown number.
It contained a photograph of Eleanor standing beside a private plane.
The little girl in the red dress slept in her arms.
Beneath the photograph was a message.
YOUR FATHER DID NOT PAY ME TO DISAPPEAR, OLIVIA. HE PAID ME TO PROTECT YOUR FIRST CHILD FROM EVELYN. IF YOU WANT YOUR DAUGHTER, BRING ME THE ORIGINAL LETTER AND COME WITHOUT THE POLICE.

A second message arrived before I could respond.
And do not trust the recording from your father’s study. Grant and Evelyn left him alive.
I stared at the final sentence.
If Grant and Evelyn had not delivered the fatal blow, then someone else had entered my father’s study after they left.
Someone whose voice had been removed from the recording.
I enlarged the photograph of Eleanor and my daughter.
Reflected in the plane’s window was a third person sitting inside the cabin.
My father….

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