“I know.”
“And she’s yours.”
I stared at the hairbrush between us.
“I’m afraid I’ll look at her and see everything I missed.”
“I finally have a daughter, Claire.”
Nora wiped her cheeks.
That hurt.
Because she was right.
I couldn’t recover Ellie’s first words or the birthdays I’d spent visiting a grave.
She was right.
***
Two days later, our attorney called with an update.
The records review had identified two newborns whose hospital identification numbers appeared to have been transposed during a neonatal transfer.
One infant was recorded as deceased. Another had entered emergency protective care under incomplete identifying information.
One infant was recorded as deceased.
Ellie’s earliest child-welfare record carried the number originally assigned to Lucy. But the identification-number discrepancy did not explain who had declared Lucy dead, how that death had been verified, or why the conflicting records had gone unchallenged. Investigators were examining each of those failures separately.
