CHAPTER 4 — THE GHOST IN THE ARCHIVE
Three weeks after Daniel Thorne disappeared behind prison walls, Mara believed the nightmare had finally ended.
Until the hospital's oldest archivist died.
Officially, Arthur Bennett suffered a heart attack while organizing records in the hospital basement.
Unofficially...
he died clutching a flash drive.
Detective Ruiz handed it to Mara inside the empty pathology lab.
"It was hidden inside his mouth."
Mara stared.
Arthur had worked at St. Catherine's for forty-two years.
He never trusted computers.
If he had hidden something this way...
it meant someone inside the hospital was still hunting evidence.
The drive contained only one folder.
PROJECT GENESIS.
No medical files.
No financial statements.
Instead...
there were birth certificates.
Hundreds of them.
Each one altered.
Children whose identities had quietly changed after entering foster care.
Sophie wasn't the only child whose past had been rewritten.
She was simply the only survivor who discovered it.
Then Mara opened the final document.
Her own adoption approval.
It carried her signature.
A signature she had never written.
Someone had forged her into the conspiracy years before she even met Sophie.
Suddenly, everything Daniel had done looked much smaller.
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He hadn't created the system.
He had inherited it.
