25. Callum
— ? —
Callum
It takes four hours to get her down.
Four hours of the sound I have spent six years failing to fix - the rigid little body, the screaming that isn’t words, the reaching and the rejection - except tonight I understand it in a way I never let myself before.
She isn’t inconsolable because something is wrong with her.
She’s inconsolable because the one person who ever knew how to sit on the floor and not leave just walked out the door, and I am the reason, and I cannot tell her that.
She finally falls asleep across her bed at ten, sideways, one shoe still on, the rabbit clutched to her chest, her face swollen and streaked.
I take the shoe off. I pull the blanket up.
I sit on the edge of the mattress and I watch her breathe for a long time, this child I have loved from the first second, this child who was never mine to love.
Then I go down to the study, and I start pulling every piece of paper I own.
Here is the thing I have never done, in six years. I have never asked how.
That’s what’s eating through me now, worse than my mother, worse than anything - that I never asked.
A woman handed me a newborn three days after I signed a form, and I was so savagely grateful, so terrified she’d be taken back, that I built my whole understanding of it out of not-looking.
Private adoption. All correct. All fast. My mother knew a firm.
I never said the word how out loud, because to say it was to risk an answer, and I did not want an answer. I wanted my daughter.
Nichole said it on the stairs and it went into me like a blade: you didn’t ask a single one.
So I ask now.
The adoption certificate is clean. Notarized, filed, incontestable, exactly as it was designed to be. But underneath it, in the folder my mother’s people assembled for me six years ago and I never once read past the first page, the paper starts to tell on itself.
The placement did not come through a firm.
There is no agency letterhead. There is no caseworker, no home study, no guardian ad litem, none of the machinery that is supposed to stand between a mother and the loss of her child.
There is a name, signed at the bottom of the relinquishment and the placement summary and the medical release, the same hand every time.
Corinne Halloway. Administrator, Saint Anne’s.
Not an adoption professional. A hospital administrator. Signing a child out of one life and into another like she was discharging a patient.
And behind her, on the money - because there is always money - there is a line item I skated past for six years because it was dressed up to look like philanthropy.
A donation to the hospital’s foundation, the same week.
And a second payment, smaller, personal, routed through a private charitable trust with a coastal address.
I know the address.
I grew up in it.
Sitting back in my chair, I feel the room go very quiet, and I make myself turn to the last page, the registration of the trust, and I read the names on the board the way you’d read a sentence handed down in a courtroom.
Adelaide Lippitt. Chair.
My mother.
My mother’s name, on the money, on the machine that took a living child from a girl in a hospital gown and told her it was dead and handed it to me.
I think about the woman I found crying on my servants’ staircase with her fist in her mouth.
I think about the way she calmed my daughter in eleven minutes on a marble floor.
I think about a pantry, and balloons, and a birthday she spent smiling for a child who shared it with the one she buried.
I think about blood on stone stairs, and a party full of people, and my mother with both hands pressed to her mouth saying she pushed her.
I think: my mother has been standing in the same rooms as her. For five months. Passing her the salt. Complimenting the flowers. Watching her raise the child, smiling at her over dinner, and knowing. Knowing the whole time.
She recognized her at that first dinner.
I remember it now - the way her face went still and cold when Nichole and Olivia were in the room together.
I read it as contempt. It wasn’t contempt.
It was a woman looking at the one person on earth who could unmake what she’d built, and starting, immediately, to plan.
Whatever you think you’ve found in this family, girl - I put it there. And I can take it back.
She wasn’t threatening to take Nichole’s marriage.
She was telling her, to her face, exactly what she’d done, and betting she’d never understand it in time.
I don’t cry. I want to. There’s something building behind my sternum that has been building since I watched Nichole walk out my front door, and I think if I let it move it will not stop, and I cannot afford to let it move yet, because there is work to do first.
I gather the pages into a folder of my own.
The signatures. The donations. The trust. The name on the board.
It isn’t enough - I know it isn’t enough, a clever woman with lawyers can make a paper trail mean anything she wants - but it is a place to start, and it points, arrow-straight, at a single administrator who signed her name at the bottom of every lie.
Corinne Halloway.
If my mother built this, she built it out of someone. And someone who signs their name at the bottom of a thing like this does not sleep well for six years. Someone like that is waiting, whether they know it or not, for a knock on the door.
I pick up my keys at midnight.
Mrs. Fairfax is still awake - she has not gone to bed once tonight, not through the screaming, not through any of it - and she meets me in the front hall with her hands folded and her face pale.
“Sir,” she says. “It’s the middle of the night. Where are you going?”
I look at her. This woman who said you could be hers, five months ago, in a bathroom, over my daughter’s wet hair, and meant nothing by it, and was more right than any of us knew.
“To ask a woman a question,” I tell her.
I open the door on the dark.
“And I’m not leaving until she answers it.”