PART 2
Standing in the doorway was Priya Danner, a woman I recognized instantly, though it took my mind several disoriented seconds to place exactly why.
She’d been a labor and delivery nurse at Ridgeview Memorial, the hospital where I’d given birth eight years earlier. I remembered her vaguely from those two lost days after my emergency delivery, a soft-spoken presence checking my vitals while I drifted in and out of consciousness.
“Marielle,” she said, her own face going pale as she registered who I was. “Oh my God. You’re Ethan’s—Everett’s mother.”
“You’re Baxter’s mother?” I managed. “You worked at Ridgeview when I delivered.”
Priya’s hands were shaking now too. “I adopted Baxter through a private arrangement eight years ago. I was told his birth mother had passed away shortly after delivery and his father couldn’t care for a child alone. I never imagined—” She stopped, staring at Everett and Baxter sitting a few feet apart, their identical gray eyes watching this unfolding revelation with matching confusion.
The principal, sensing the gravity of what was happening far exceeded a routine disciplinary meeting, quietly suggested we move to a private conference room, away from the boys, to continue the conversation.
“Bram told me our second son died,” I said, once we were alone. “He said there was no body to see because I was too weak, that he’d handled everything himself. I never questioned it. Why would I have questioned it?”
Priya’s expression shifted from shock into something considerably more troubled. “The arrangement I went through wasn’t a hospital-facilitated adoption. It was private, facilitated by a man who told me he was the birth father, acting alone because the mother had died in childbirth. I paid a placement fee. I signed private adoption paperwork, notarized outside the hospital’s normal channels.”
“A placement fee,” I repeated slowly. “You paid Bram money for my living son.”
