Chapter 8 - THE NIGHT THE TRUTH ALMOST DISAPPEARED
The original laboratory report was held in a secure archive at Harrington Center.
At least, that was what Marlene claimed.
Rebecca arranged a meeting with investigators, and the clinic agreed to preserve its electronic records. For the first time, I felt as though the truth might finally become something more substantial than recordings, suspicious signatures, and frightened witnesses.
Then Marlene failed to appear.
Her attorney called at 7:15 that evening to say she had suffered a panic attack and would not be attending the meeting.
At 7:42, the clinic reported an attempted unauthorized access to its archive.
At 8:10, Rebecca received a call from the police.
A security camera had recorded a man entering the building through a service corridor shortly before the system went offline.
The image was blurry.
But I recognized the shape of his shoulders.
Vincent.
“He told me he wanted to make things right,” I whispered.
Rebecca looked at the still image.
“Wanting to make things right and wanting to control the evidence can look remarkably similar from a distance.”
The police contacted Vincent.
He claimed he had visited the clinic to retrieve personal documents and had no knowledge of the attempted access.
He denied entering the archive.
The footage couldn't establish what he had done inside the building.
By midnight, the story had changed again.
Marlene's attorney contacted Rebecca with a new claim.
Marlene had received a message warning her not to cooperate.
The message contained a photograph of her teenage son leaving school.
The police treated the threat seriously.
Marlene agreed to meet at a secure location the following morning.
I was not supposed to attend.
I went anyway.
She arrived with her attorney and two detectives. She was a small woman with gray-streaked hair and trembling hands.
“I should have reported him the first time he asked,” she said.
“Why didn't you?” I asked.
She looked at me.
“Because he offered money. Because my husband had lost his job. Because I convinced myself that I was only correcting a record, not changing a life.”
“What did you actually do?”
“I altered the treatment file to make it appear that an embryo had been assigned to Vanessa. I used a reference number from an archived research record.”
“Was there an embryo?”
“I don't know.”
The answer stunned me.
“You don't know?”
“I never saw a viable embryo associated with your name. Vincent insisted that the material had been processed elsewhere. He said the laboratory report would arrive later.”
Rebecca leaned forward.
“Did you transfer any biological material?”
“No. I prepared the paperwork. Another laboratory was supposed to handle the treatment.”
“Which laboratory?”
Marlene gave the detectives a name.
A small private facility outside Boston.
It had since closed.
The detectives wrote it down.
I felt sick.
“So you falsified the records without knowing whether the treatment was even possible?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She began to cry.
“Because Vincent said the child was already on the way. He told me the only problem was that the records hadn't caught up.”
The room fell silent.
If Marlene was telling the truth, the clinic's documentation might have been constructed around an event that never happened as described.
But Vanessa was pregnant.
Her ultrasound had shown a real pregnancy.
The baby was real.
The question was whether the story Vincent had told both women was real.
Marlene handed the detectives a printed email.
It contained instructions from Vincent to send the original laboratory report to a private storage company.
The report had been removed from the clinic's archive months earlier.
Its last recorded destination was a secure document vault in downtown Chicago.
The detectives obtained a warrant.
That afternoon, they recovered a sealed envelope from the vault.
Inside were laboratory notes, a chain-of-custody form, and a single page containing handwritten initials.
The report did not establish that my mother's sample had been used to create an embryo.
It did establish that a biological specimen had been transferred between two laboratories without a complete chain of authorization.
At the bottom of the page was a note.
Potential second source identified. Awaiting confirmation.
Rebecca read it twice.
“Second source?” I asked.
“We don't know what it means.”
I stared at the words.
My mother's sample might have been involved.
Or it might not have been.
The records were too incomplete to establish the truth.
That night, Vanessa called me from the shelter.
She was crying.
“Claire, I need to tell you something.”
“What happened?”
“I received a letter from Vincent's attorney.”
“What did it say?”
“He wants me to sign an agreement stating that I won't pursue any claims against him or the clinic.”
“Did you sign it?”
“No.”
“Good.”
She took a shaky breath.
“There's something else. Vincent said if I refuse, he'll tell everyone that I knew the embryo wasn't mine and that I agreed to the arrangement.”
I closed my eyes.
“He's trying to protect himself.”
“I know. But I don't know what to believe anymore.”
Neither did I.
Then Vanessa said, “Claire, I found a photograph in the envelope he gave me before Christmas.”
“What photograph?”
“It's an old laboratory image. There's a date on the back.”
She read it aloud.
The date was seven years earlier.
The year my mother died.
May you like
And beneath it, in Vincent's handwriting, were six words.
The original belongs to her daughter.
