“I know,” she sobbed.
I stood up, shaking. “Then explain.”
My mother covered her face for a moment, then forced herself to look at me.
“The hospital made a terrible mistake. Clark was extremely weak, yes. He was transferred in the middle of the night to a children’s cardiac unit two hours away. You were unconscious after complications. Daniel had collapsed from exhaustion in the waiting area. I was the only family member awake when the paperwork came.”
I could barely hear her over the rushing in my ears.
“A nurse told me he had been transferred. Then a doctor came later, confused by the records, and said the baby had passed. I told him there had been a transfer, but he checked the wrong file. Everything was chaos. Two premature baby boys had similar names in the unit.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” I whispered.
“I tried to find out. I called the transfer hospital. They said no baby under Clark’s name had arrived. I thought maybe the first nurse had been mistaken.”
My mother’s voice broke.
“Then, three days after the funeral, I received a call from a woman named Margaret Reed. She said she and her husband had been fostering a newborn boy from the hospital emergency program. The baby had no proper family information attached because of a paperwork error. She said one nurse had whispered to her that the child might belong to a mother who had been told he died.”
I gripped the back of a chair.
“She called you?”
“Yes. She said the baby was alive, but fragile. He needed months of special care. She wanted to return him if we could prove he was yours.”
“Then why didn’t you bring him back?”
My mother wept openly now.
“Because when I went to see him, the Reeds were there. They were kind people. They had lost their own child years before. They were caring for him day and night. He was attached to machines. He looked so small, so breakable.”
Her voice dropped to a whisper.
