By morning, Daniel’s pillow is still missing from our bed, his side neatly smooth, as if the night erased him on purpose.
The house is quiet in the peculiar way big houses get—no real silence, just a hum of distant vents and the faint clink of dishes two floors down. Someone has already replenished the holiday greenery along the upstairs railing; the Mercer crest hangs in the center of a garland, its silver waves catching the light from the tall windows. The air smells of pine and the lingering bite of coffee from the kitchen below, threaded with something sharper, that hospital disinfectant tang rising from the hill.
I wrap my scarf tighter and head down anyway.
In the kitchen, a housekeeper I barely know slides a tray of scones from the oven. The warm butter-and-sugar smell hits me like a hand on my chest.
“Those look amazing,” I tell her, my voice too bright. “Mind if I, um, bring some into town? For Mrs. Donnelly. She isn’t… she doesn’t get out much.”
She gives me a quick, appraising glance.
“Of course, Mrs. Mercer,” she says. “Just let me box them.”
Mrs. Mercer. The title rings oddly in my ears, brittle after last night’s fight. I watch her tuck the golden scones into a white bakery box stamped with the Foundation’s wave crest. Even generosity here comes branded.
Ten minutes later, I’m inching the car down the long drive, the cliffside estate shrinking behind me. I bypass the back road Daniel texted days ago and stick to the main route into town, windshield wipers ticking away fine sleet. Below, Harbor Glen curls along the narrow peninsula, the harbor to one side, the manicured town center to the other. Light the Harbor banners still flap from lampposts, their cheerful boats printed in blue and gold, but the parade is over; now they just feel like labels, reminders of who owns what.
As I pass the hospital turnoff, the Mercer Foundation sign looms up out of the gray, the abstract wave crest glowing softly on a backlit panel. The glass façade of the foundation wing reflects the dull sky. I taste metal at the back of my tongue and swallow hard.
“Love and harm, same hands,” I murmur into the empty car. “Pick a side, Hannah.”
Mrs. Donnelly’s neighborhood sits on the slope between hospital hill and the working docks—small houses with sagging porches, tight driveways. I pull in at the curb, tires crunching on old salt scattered over the pavement. The air is colder here, sharper; woodsmoke curls down from chimneys and mixes with the faint briny rot from the harbor.
Her house is the same as before, peeling paint and a crooked front step. Only this time, a thin gray thread of smoke wafts from the chimney in a steady, relentless stream.
My stomach clenches.
I lift the pastry box and walk up, boots thudding on the porch boards. The air right at the door smells not just of smoke but of hot paper, that unmistakable bitter edge. I press the doorbell and hear it buzz faintly inside.
Nothing.
I knock, harder. “Mrs. Donnelly? It’s Hannah. From the other day—I brought scones.”
A long beat passes. I consider that she might be pretending not to be home, that I should respect the first no and leave the box on the step, but another gust of smoke hits my face and my pulse kicks up. I lean closer to the thin wooden panel.
“I just want to check on you,” I call. “Please. Just for a minute.”
A chain rattles. The door opens a crack, catching on the chain. Her eye peers out, rimmed red.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she whispers. The crack of her voice matches the crack in the door.
Over her shoulder, I see the orange flicker of a fire and, above it, a plume of smoke already staining the low ceiling.
“Is everything okay?” I ask. “Your fireplace—”
“Fine,” she says. “I’m fine. Go home now, Mrs. Mercer. You… you have to stay out of this.”
She starts to shut the door, but my hand shoots out, palm flat against the wood.
“Please,” I say. The pastry box wobbles in my other hand. “I had an accident yesterday. On the back road by the harbor. My car—” My throat tightens. “I just, I don’t want to leave anything unfinished.”
Something in her face shifts at the word accident. The chain slides back with a shaky clink. She opens the door wide enough for me to step in, then glances past me at the street before shutting it.
The heat hits me first, thick and close. The living room is a low, cramped box, the curtains drawn. The fire in the brick fireplace roars too high, flames licking around a stack of papers on the grate. The smoke rises in an uneven column, carrying the acrid smell of ink and aging paper.
I blink against the sting in my eyes.
“You’re burning something,” I say, because the obvious presses hard against my chest. “That can’t be safe. Do you have a poker—”
I set the bakery box down on the coffee table, its glossy white surface suddenly obscene in this dingy room, and take a step toward the fire.
“Don’t,” Mrs. Donnelly says quickly. Her hand clamps around my wrist with surprising strength. “Stay back. It’s just old rubbish.”
The word rubbish rings false; nothing about this feels casual. Through the flames, I catch a glimpse of hospital letterhead on a half-folded page—Mercer Hospital in crisp blue, the wave crest faintly watermarked behind a block of text.
My heart jolts.
Another paper slips from her hands and lands on the hearthstone, one corner catching. The top half is blackened, curling, but the lower half stays flat for a second, and I see it: ADOPTION PLACEMENT SUMMARY in bold caps, and beneath it, a line of type partially obscured by thick black marker. Baby [REDACTED]. The word is literally there, stamped in uppercase where a name should be.
“Oh my God,” I breathe.
Instinct overrides everything. I jerk my wrist free, snatch my phone from my pocket, and drop to my knees in front of the hearth.
The heat sears my face. Ash floats up in tiny white flakes, landing in my hair. I angle the camera and snap three photos in quick succession before the corner crackles and the page twists toward the flames. The text blurs in the motion, but the heading and the crest are clear enough.
“Stop it,” Mrs. Donnelly cries. She tries to shove me aside, her voice rising into a panicked keening. “They said it all had to go, every last copy. You can’t—”
“Who said?” My voice comes out raw. I reach with the fireplace poker and hook the edge of the page, dragging it away from the hottest part of the fire. The top half disintegrates, flaking to black snow, but a charred lower strip tears free and falls onto the stone, edges glowing.
I slam the poker down on it to smother the glow, then use the tip to flip the fragment over. Case No. 14— the last digit scorched away. The year field reads 20—, the last two numbers lost to the burn, but the sequence makes my stomach twist. A mother’s name appears, half-burned, the last letters of a surname I don’t recognize.
Mrs. Donnelly lets out a hoarse sob and collapses into the old armchair across from the fire. Her hands shake against her lap.
“This is evidence,” I say, more to myself than to her. I crouch lower and take another photo, focusing on the scorched case number and the Mercer crest ghosting behind the text. The smell of singed paper clings to my tongue.
“Evidence of what?” she whispers. “That I disobeyed orders? That I kept copies when I was told not to? They’ll blame me, don’t you see? They’ll say I was the one hiding things.”
I look up at her. The room wavers slightly around the edges; sweat runs down my spine under my coat.
“Who told you to burn them?” I ask.
She presses her hands over her face, fingers digging into her cheeks, then drags them down, leaving faint white streaks. Her eyes shine in the firelight.
“You had to come back,” she says bitterly. “I prayed you’d forget this little house and go back up to your cliffs and your parades.”
“Mrs. Donnelly.” I pick up the fragment carefully with the poker and lay it on the hearth, out of the fire’s reach. “Please. I’m not here to hurt you. I just need to understand.”
She stares at the fragment, the way the blackened edge crumbles if the draft from the chimney hits it wrong.
“I remember when they first asked,” she says finally, voice thin. “Years ago now. I’d already left the maternity ward, moved down to day surgery to get away from the crying. A man from administration came down with a list and a smile, said legal needed certain adoption records ‘tidied up’ for confidentiality. ‘Old cases,’ he said. ‘No one’s business anymore.’”
Her gaze goes distant, fixed somewhere past my shoulder.
“He made it sound like shredding old menus,” she mutters. “But I recognized some of the file numbers. Mothers who’d begged for time. Babies that went straight from delivery room to another woman’s arms. And then…” She swallows hard. “And then she came herself.”
My skin tightens.
“Evelyn,” I say.
She flinches at the name.
“She wore that blue coat she always wore on the maternity floor,” Mrs. Donnelly says. “The one that matched the hospital logo. She said keeping duplicate records off-site made families vulnerable to ‘misinterpretation’ and ‘extortion.’ She said, ‘We built lives around these adoptions, dear. We can’t have people digging around in old wounds because they’re lonely or angry.’”
My breath staggers in my chest. I smell the estate’s woodsmoke on that coat in my mind, overlaying the tang of this living room.
“So you burned them,” I say. The accusation slips out under the words.
Her shoulders hunch.
“I boxed them,” she says. “That first night. I brought them home. I told myself I’d turn them over to someone else, some… oversight body. But life happened. My husband got sick. The hospital sent cards with the Mercer crest on the envelopes and covered part of the chemo costs. I watched her hand ponytail holders to the candy-stripers and thought, she does good, too. I kept telling myself I’d take the box back and say I’d made a mistake.”
The fire spits, a tiny explosion of sap in the log.
“They found out you still had them,” I guess quietly.
She gives a small, jerky nod.
“A month ago, a young man from records showed up,” she says. “Nice suit. Mercer Foundation pin on his lapel. He said there’d been a ‘compliance review,’ that any off-site medical documents needed to be destroyed or returned. He already had a list of the file numbers in my box. He didn’t ask how they got here. He just smiled and said, ‘We’re tidying up history, Mrs. Donnelly. For everyone’s sake.’”
Every hair on my arms stands up.
“He told you to burn them,” I say.
“He said they weren’t allowed back in the building,” she answers. “New policy. Liability. He even brought kindling.” Her laugh cracks. “Kindling. From the foundation that pays for the NICU incubators.”
I glance at the bakery box on the table, the neat printed crest on the lid. Every good deed stamped with the same mark that now hovers on this dying scrap of paper.
“Why now?” I ask. “Why finish burning them today?”
She looks at me with a mixture of accusation and pleading.
“Because you came here,” she says. “You said their name. You asked about a special baby. After you left, the phone rang and a woman from the hospital said she heard I’d gotten ‘confused’ with an old visitor. She reminded me of my confidentiality agreement. She mentioned my grandniece’s job at the front desk. She said, ‘Let’s not drag anyone else into this, hm?’”
She wipes her nose with the back of her hand.
“I couldn’t breathe,” she whispers. “I went to the closet and pulled the box into the living room and just… started. One file at a time. I thought if they were ash, no one could use them against the families, or against me. And then you rang the bell.”
I look at the fire, at the remaining stack of papers beside the grate—thinner now, a ragged handful. How many lives reduced to that pile. How many already gone.
“Do you know what was in them?” I ask. “Beyond the basic forms?”
“Notes,” she says. “Little things we weren’t supposed to write but did anyway. ‘Mother changed her mind but was overruled.’ ‘Father unaware.’ ‘Crib tag swapped per admin.’” Her voice shakes. “Names, too. Birth names and new names side by side. That’s what she hated most, I think. The pairs.”
My throat burns. The heat from the fireplace blends with an internal fire that licks at every soft place in me.
“You kept any?” I ask. “Anything at all?”
She stares at me for a long, raw moment.
“You’ll get yourself killed,” she says. “Do you know that? You and that girl on the phone, the one who keeps calling around town asking about ‘paper orphans.’ People hear. People talk. Harbor Glen takes care of the Mercers. Always has.”
“Harbor Glen built its donor walls on those lives,” I answer. I hear the edge in my own voice and don’t sand it down. “On those pairs.”
She flinches again, then pushes herself up out of the chair. Her knees crack audibly. She shuffles to the low bookshelf against the wall, fingers trailing along the dusty spines of romance paperbacks and old nursing manuals. At the far end, she crouches with a grunt and reaches behind a stack of phone books.
When she stands, an envelope dangles from her hand. It’s yellowed and crumpled at the corners, thick with something inside. The Mercer Hospital letterhead is faint at the top, the crest just visible.
“I couldn’t burn this one,” she says. “I took it out and put it back three times. I don’t know why. Maybe I recognized the date.” She presses it into my hand, her fingers icy despite the heat around us. “You take it. But you do not tell anyone it came from me. Not your husband, not the girl on the phone, not the police. No one.”
The paper feels heavier than it should. My heart slams.
“What is it?” I ask.
“A summary,” she says. “One of the early ones. The year the Mercers started getting really interested in ‘special placements.’ You’ll see the terms. You’ll see the clauses about distance and contact. Maybe you’ll even see why your mother-in-law thinks she’s saving everyone.”
The mention of clauses pricks at the memory of the trust document on Evelyn’s desk, the redacted name under “Second Daughter Beneficiary.”
“Why not burn it?” I press. “If you’re that scared?”
Her mouth trembles.
“Because I’m tired of being the only one who remembers what we did,” she whispers. “If you walk away, you can throw it in the Sound and no one will know. But if you keep going, you’ll need more than stories from an old woman in a rented house.”
For a second, the room shrinks down to the envelope in my hand and the fire roaring beside us. I think of Daniel, clutching his pillow, worried about nutcases and dark docks. I think of Riley’s voice in my ear, sharp and controlled, talking about paper orphans and erased names.
“Thank you,” I say. I tuck the envelope inside my coat, into the inner pocket I use for my phone. The paper crinkles against the lining. “I promise I won’t use your name. Ever.”
“You won’t have to,” she says with a bitter little smile. “Theirs will be written all over it.”
She glances at the remaining stack of files by the fireplace. A muscle jumps in her jaw.
“What about those?” I ask quietly.
Her eyes close for a moment.
“You can’t save everything,” she says. “Sometimes you pick one page and pray it’s enough.”
The words land in my chest like a stone.
I look at the fire, at the papers waiting their turn to become smoke and gray dust. The hospital on the hill glows white in my mind’s eye, its corridors smelling of antiseptic and coffee and baby lotion. Lives rearranged and recorded, then recorded over.
“Then I’ll make this page count,” I say.
I bend, pick up the charred fragment from the hearth with two fingers, and slip it into the outer pocket of my coat. It leaves a smear of black on my skin. Case No. 14-, a single missing digit that hums between my ribs.
Mrs. Donnelly doesn’t stop me.
When I step back out into the cold, the air on the porch tastes cleaner, despite the lingering smoke. The harbor wind cuts through my coat and flaps the Light the Harbor banner on the nearest lamppost, making the printed boats bob in midair. Up on the hill, the Mercer crest on the hospital sign gleams against the gray.
I walk to the car with the envelope pressed against my heart and the charred scrap scratching my palm. Behind me, the chimney sends up another steady ribbon of smoke. Pages turning into air. Names turning into nothing.
I slide into the driver’s seat and lock the doors before letting myself breathe. The envelope rustles when I shift. Inside, whatever Mrs. Donnelly saved waits like a live wire. A date. A set of clauses. A name.
Maybe my mother’s.
The thought shoves itself forward so hard I grip the steering wheel to steady my hands. The char dust on my fingers leaves dark half-moons on the leather.
If the Mercers can burn adoption files in a retired nurse’s fireplace without anyone blinking, what else did they rewrite in rooms I’ve never seen? In records with my birth year on the top line?
I start the engine. Instead of pointing the car straight back to the cliffside mansion, I sit there for a moment, watching my breath fog the windshield.
There’s one person who can tell me whether my own story ever crossed that hospital’s threshold.
Before I turn the car around, I dig out my phone, open my contacts, and hover over the number labeled Mom, my thumb hesitating above the call button.
If I ask the wrong question, I could crack whatever fragile version of my life she’s been holding together for thirty years.
If I don’t, I might be driving home to a house built entirely on someone else’s ashes.