I inserted the flash drive into my laptop with hands that no longer felt connected to me.
There was only one video file.
Its date was eleven months earlier.
The thumbnail showed a thin woman lying in a hospital bed.
I put on my headphones and pressed play.
The woman on the screen looked close to my age. Her face was narrow from illness, and a knitted blue cap covered most of her hair. An oxygen tube ran beneath her nose.
A young man's shoulder appeared at the edge of the frame.
Julian.
I couldn't see his face yet.
The woman took several shallow breaths.
"Evan," she began, then stopped.
A man's voice answered softly from behind the camera.
"It's okay."
Her eyes filled.
"No. It isn't."
She explained that she had been told eighteen years earlier that a four-month-old boy needed a home.
The baby's parents, she was told, already had two other infants and could no longer cope with the third child's medical problems.
The placement would be private.
Confidential.
Permanent.
Someone had assured Rebecca that the biological parents had agreed.
"Who brought me to you?" Julian asked.
Rebecca closed her eyes.
"Elaine."
I ripped off the headphones.
My mother's name seemed to remain in the room after the sound disappeared.
I stood, paced once across the bedroom, then returned to the desk.
Perhaps it was another Elaine.
Perhaps the entire recording had been constructed.
Perhaps someone had spent years assembling an elaborate lie.
I put the headphones back on.
Rebecca continued.
Elaine had known how desperately she wanted a child. Rebecca had suffered years of infertility and several miscarriages. When Elaine contacted her and said there was a baby whose parents could not manage his medical needs, Rebecca believed she was being given an extraordinary opportunity.
There had been paperwork.
A physician.
A lawyer.
Everything had looked official.
For almost three years, Rebecca believed the story.
Then she discovered a death certificate.
Julian's death certificate.
The baby's date of birth matched.
The hospital matched.
The biological mother's name had been partially redacted on Rebecca's copies, but enough information remained to make her suspicious.
She confronted Elaine.
According to Rebecca, my mother finally admitted the truth.
Julian had never been surrendered.
His mother believed he had died.
Rebecca began crying.
"I should have gone to the police," she said. "I should have found you immediately."
Julian's voice was quiet.
"Why didn't you?"
"Because by then you called me Mom."
She covered her mouth.
"I was afraid they would take you away. Elaine told me I could lose you and go to prison. She said your birth mother had rebuilt her life and that revealing everything would destroy two families."
I stared at the screen.
Rebecca had made a terrible choice.
But I could hear the shame in her voice.
My mother, however, had apparently created the choice in the first place.
Then Rebecca said something that made me forget to breathe.
"Elaine didn't pick me because I was some stranger desperate for a baby."
Julian asked what she meant.
Rebecca looked directly toward the camera.
"She's my mother."
I paused the recording.
My bedroom became absolutely silent.
My mother had another daughter.
A daughter I had never heard about.
I restarted the video.
Elaine had become pregnant at seventeen. Her parents forced her to surrender the baby.
That baby was Rebecca.
Decades later, my mother found her.
Rebecca was thirty-six.
Elaine apparently spent years trying to compensate for the daughter she had lost—sending money, offering help, trying to become part of her life.
Rebecca wanted one thing Elaine could not simply purchase.
A child.
After another miscarriage, Elaine promised her that someday she would be a mother.
Months afterward, I became pregnant with triplets.
My stomach turned.
My mother had watched three boys grow inside me while secretly maintaining a relationship with another daughter who desperately wanted a baby.
Rebecca insisted she never requested one of mine.
At first, she hadn't even known I existed.
Elaine had kept her daughters apart.
When Julian became ill at four months old, my mother apparently saw an opportunity.
Rebecca said Elaine arrived late one evening carrying Julian in a blue blanket.
She told her the biological parents had changed their minds after yet another health emergency.
Rebecca accepted him.
For almost three years, she believed she had adopted an unwanted child.
Then came the death certificate.
The confrontation.
The truth.
The silence.
Julian asked, "When did she tell you who my mother was?"
Rebecca looked toward him.
"When you were three."
"What was her name?"
Rebecca hesitated.
"Laura."
My name.
I shut the laptop.
I bent forward until my forehead touched my knees.
For eighteen years, I had blamed myself for details that suddenly had different meanings.
Why hadn't I insisted on seeing Julian's body?
Why had the hospital moved so quickly?
Why had my mother handled every document?
Why had Dr. Harlan been so reluctant to look at me?
Why had the funeral been closed-casket?
At the time, every answer had seemed connected to grief.
Now they looked like pieces of a plan.
I opened the box again.
Beneath the flash drive were photocopied medical documents, bank records and letters.
One page contained Julian's hospital identification number.
Another carried Dr. Warren Harlan's name.
My pulse quickened.
That was the physician who had told us Julian died.
Another document showed a payment from an account controlled by Elaine to a consulting company connected with Harlan.
The transfer occurred three days after Julian's supposed death.
There was also a payment to an attorney.
And another to Sonia Pike, a nurse who had worked at the hospital.
The amounts were large enough that they could not plausibly be thank-you gifts.
I turned over another page.
Seventeen handwritten letters were listed in an inventory from Rebecca's metal box.
Rebecca had apparently written one letter to me every year after Julian's first birthday.
She gave them to Elaine to deliver when "the time was right."
Elaine returned every one.
Unopened.
She told Rebecca I refused contact.
I stared at that line until anger displaced shock.
Seventeen opportunities.
Seventeen separate years in which my mother could have stopped.
This had not been one panicked decision.
It had been renewed over and over.
I found the final page of Julian's letter.
He was in town.
He wanted to meet me the following morning at ten, beside the old boathouse at Riverside Park.
Then came the sentence that frightened me almost as much as everything about my mother.
Rebecca believed Dad knew more than he admitted.
Caleb.
I read those words three times.
My husband had buried his face against my shoulder after Julian died.
He had spent nights walking the floor with Ethan and Noah while I was too grief-stricken to sleep.
For eighteen years, he carried a photograph of all three newborn boys in his wallet.
Could he have known?
"Laura!"
His voice came from downstairs.
"Are we ever seeing this cake?"
I quickly repacked the documents and pushed the box behind folded blankets in the closet.
In the bathroom mirror, my face looked pale.
I splashed water beneath my eyes and went downstairs.
The backyard erupted in applause when I appeared with the cake.
Ethan and Noah stood shoulder to shoulder beneath the patio lights.
Their faces were similar enough that strangers still confused them, though I never did.
I suddenly imagined a third face beside theirs.
Julian.
Alive.
My mother sat near the grill wearing a pale green blouse.
Two small jewelry boxes rested in front of her.
She had given Ethan and Noah matching watches.
"There you are," Elaine said. "I thought you'd vanished."
I looked at the woman who had held me while I mourned.
The woman who had visited Julian's grave with me.
The woman who may have known exactly where he was.
"Couldn't find the candles," I said.
Her smile lingered.
"Are you all right?"
That same gentle concern.
The same tone she had used in the hospital.
I nearly told her everything.
Instead I said, "Just emotional."
She glanced toward the twins.
"Eighteen years goes quickly."
My stomach tightened.
We sang.
The boys blew out the candles.
Caleb slipped an arm around me.
"We did pretty well," he whispered.
I went rigid for half a second before forcing myself to relax.
Across the table, Elaine noticed.
Later, when she prepared to leave, Caleb walked her to the driveway.
Through the kitchen window, I saw them talking beside her car.
Elaine said something.
Caleb answered.
Then both of them turned toward the house.
I stepped quickly away from the window.
Ten minutes later, Caleb came inside.
"Your mom thinks you're upset," he said.
I stared at him.
"Why?"
He shrugged.
"You've been quiet."
"Did she ask you whether something happened?"
"Pretty much."
He kissed my forehead and went upstairs.
I remained in the kitchen long after the lights outside had been switched off.
Tomorrow morning, I would meet the son I had buried.
And when I came home, I would find out whether my husband had helped put him in that grave.
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: I Met the Son I Had Mourned Since Infancy, Then He Showed Me Documents Bearing His Father’s Signature
Eighteen Years After We Buried Our Son, Someone Left a Birthday Gift That Could Only Have Come From Him
Part 2 of 10
