Riley’s office sits above a nail salon and a tax accountant, squeezed into the second floor of a brick building that faces the Harbor Glen main street. From the sidewalk, it looks like another forgotten professional suite, a place where wills get notarized and no one risks anything bigger than a parking ticket.
Inside, it smells like burnt coffee, printer toner, and the faint salt that pushes in through the old sash windows from the harbor a few blocks down. The sound of traffic on the narrow peninsula drifts up in waves: car doors, a distant gull, a snippet of laughter from someone who has never heard the phrase “paper orphan.”
“You’re not ready,” Riley says, holding the door open with her shoulder.
“Ready for what?” I ask, stepping past her. My duffel bumps against my hip. My body feels brittle, all splintered adrenaline and motel coffee.
“Perspective,” she says. “Come in.”
The room is small but dense. Two metal filing cabinets flank a cheap particleboard desk scarred with ring marks from too many mugs. A secondhand couch slumps under the window, cushions flattened by years of exhausted bodies. On one side wall, open shelves sag under binders labeled by year and state; colored sticky notes peek out in jittery rows.
The wall opposite the door is hidden by a paint-splattered curtain, tacked up with binder clips.
I stop.
“Is that…?” My voice goes thin.
“Yeah,” she says. “That’s the part you’re not ready for.”
I drop my bag by the couch and wrap my arms around myself.
“Then show me,” I say. “I left my husband and a house with cameras in the floorboards. Ready is relative.”
She studies me for a second, her face guarded. Then she lets out a breath and flicks on the overhead light, a harsh fluorescent that hums in the old fixture.
“Okay,” she says. “Welcome to my version of the Mercer donor wall.”
She grabs one edge of the curtain and yanks it aside.
The map is bigger than the wall that holds it.
A patchwork of taped-together corkboard sheets spans from floor to ceiling, covered in pinned photographs, photocopied documents, index cards, and old news clippings. A web of string crosses back and forth: red, blue, yellow, white. The lines crisscross the room’s air, thickest near the center where they knot around a glossy printout of Harbor Glen Memorial Hospital. The Mercer crest on the hospital’s signage—those abstract waves—sits in the middle of the board like a corporate sun devouring everything in orbit.
My knees flex without permission, bracing.
“Holy…” The word falls out under my breath. “Riley.”
She steps to the side, giving me a clear view, hands shoved into the pockets of her jacket.
“You’re looking at ten years’ work,” she says. “More if I count the notebooks I kept as a teenager when people told me I was paranoid.”
I move closer, drawn in. The air near the board smells faintly of cork, old paper, and the lemon oil she must use to wipe the wall down when the toner dust builds up.
“What do the colors mean?” I ask.
“Start simple,” she says, pointing with her chin. “Red is a child who legally died on paper but has indicators of being placed in an off-record adoption. Blue is a child who legally exists but has no matching state birth or adoption record. Yellow is family connections—adoptive parents, foundation contacts, hospital staff. White is what I call event lines. Accidents, galas, big moments where money and attention move.”
I reach toward one of the red-tagged photos—a boy’s kindergarten portrait, crooked smile, front teeth missing—then stop an inch away. My fingers curl back into my palm.
“How many kids are you tracking?” I ask.
“Directly?” she says. “Fifty-eight I’d bet my license on. Probables bring it closer to ninety. The board maxes out at that. My computer holds more.”
The number tilts the room.
“And all of them…” My tongue sticks for a second. “All of them tie back to Mercer somehow?”
“Not all thematically,” she says. “But structurally? Yeah. Hospital, foundation, partner clinics, satellite programs. They set up this network of ‘support’ for women and kids, and they did help some people, which is the genius of it. Makes anyone who asks questions sound like they’re attacking charity.”
The image on the local news flashes back: Evelyn in her chair, talking about love and responsibility, the gala name curling off the anchor’s tongue like a blessing.
“Walk me through it,” I say. “From the outside in.”
She nods and steps closer to the board, voice shifting into the cadence of someone who has done this for grant committees and lawyers who never called back.
“These clusters along the left are rural hospitals,” she says, tapping a section where the strings are lighter. “Places that sent high-risk pregnancies to Harbor Glen Memorial. Some records are clean. Others show last-minute transfers, mothers discharged early, paperwork ‘lost.’”
She moves her hand inward, following a line of blue string to a group of photos.
“These kids show up on the Mercer Foundation’s ‘Adoption Success’ walls,” she says. “But they never show up in state adoption systems. Clerical error is a popular excuse. Funny how clerical error favors donors.”
My gaze catches on one of the donor names scrawled on an index card: someone I watched toast Evelyn at the Christmas Eve concert.
“These people ride at the front of the boat parade,” I say, hearing my own voice from that first night in Harbor Glen, teasing Daniel about the Light the Harbor social pecking order. “They fight for positions on the dock.”
“Exactly,” she says. “Their names show up on donor walls, hospital wings, scholarship programs. In exchange, they get ‘miracle’ placements without messy waitlists or birth families who might change their minds.”
She taps the glossy hospital printout at the center. The strings flutter.
“And in the middle,” she says, “you know who.”
I swallow, throat dry.
“Where am I?” I ask. “On this board.”
Riley glances sideways at me.
“You’re on a different board,” she says. “In my files. Too many unknowns to pin you down in the middle of this without redoing half the map. But you are here indirectly.”
My body buzzes with a restless energy, a need to move, to do something.
“Show me the part that touches Lydia,” I say. “I know there has to be one.”
She hesitates, then reaches for a small step stool propped in the corner.
“You’re not going to like it,” she says.
“I’m already not liking a lot of things,” I answer. “Just show me.”
She climbs up and starts sliding pins aside, careful not to snap any strings. Behind the more recent cases, I catch glimpses of older documents, browning edges, the font of another decade.
“The board works chronologically from left to right,” she says. “The further right you go, the closer to present day. So, accidents from your childhood sit here.”
She points to a band of white string that runs horizontally across the board like a scar. Small index cards hang from it, each labeled with an event and a date: CAR CRASH—APRIL 2001. APARTMENT FIRE—NOVEMBER 2003. BOATING ACCIDENT—JULY 2004.
My breath catches on the last one.
“That’s Lydia’s?” I ask.
“That’s the Mercer ‘tragedy’ Harbor Glen filmed three documentaries about,” Riley says. “Your sister-in-law who ‘drowned.’”
She hands me a pushpin with a colored head.
“You already found the police report,” she says. “So you know the official narrative has holes. What you didn’t know is that three days before that accident, two newborns and one six-month-old went unaccounted for in the hospital’s internal bed census.”
My vision tightens around the card.
“Unaccounted for?” I repeat.
“Officially discharged,” she corrects. “Unofficially, the discharge destinations don’t match any recorded homes, foster placements, or deaths. And one of those newborns has the same doctor signatures that show up on your mother’s employment record.”
My stomach lurches.
“That’s not proof,” I say, because the alternative is dropping to the floor.
“No,” she agrees. “It’s a pattern. Patterns are where proof likes to vacation until someone gives it a subpoena.”
I let out a shaky breath and study the cluster around the boating-accident card. Red strings, blue strings, yellow connections fan out from it, some reaching toward photos of kids whose eyes I recognize from those glossy ‘success story’ plaques. Others lead back toward the hospital, the foundation, the Mercer crest stamped on letterhead.
“How many from that year?” I ask.
“Directly tied to the accident cluster?” she says. “Seven kids. Three infants, four toddlers. Lost paperwork, fast-tracked placements, falsified death certs for mothers who did not die when the system said they did.”
“Seven,” I repeat. The word tastes metallic.
I reach for the card that says BOATING ACCIDENT—JULY 2004. The ink blurs slightly where someone’s finger must have brushed it years ago. I press my thumb on the opposite corner, grounding myself.
“So Lydia’s death sits on the same axis as seven missing kids,” I say. “And the Mercers’ charity work for ‘at-risk families’ explodes afterward.”
Riley nods.
“After a tragedy, people give more,” she says. “They tell themselves the dead would want that.”
I see Evelyn at the gala, hand on her heart, talking about honoring Lydia’s memory through the foundation. I hear the applause. I smell the woodsmoke and salt from the harbor at the boat parade, see the boats lit up, the town checking who stands where.
“This isn’t just about one stolen daughter,” I say. “This is a whole economy.”
“Exactly,” Riley says. “Accidents generate sympathy. Sympathy generates money. Money smooths over missing paperwork. Repeat.”
My chest tightens, but there’s a different pulse beneath the fear now, a thread of grim clarity.
“When we expose this,” I say slowly, “we’re not just pulling a mask off the Mercers. We’re cutting into families who think their kids came to them legally. We’re ripping into adults who grew up in those homes.”
I gesture at a row of photos lower down: teens in graduation gowns, a young woman holding a baby of her own.
“Some of these adoptions look… good,” I say. “On the surface. Smiles. Stable houses. People who stepped up.”
Riley’s jaw tightens.
“Good outcomes don’t erase stolen beginnings,” she says. “But yeah. If we do this like we’re lighting a match in a dry forest, the Mercers get to stand in the ashes and call themselves martyrs. ‘We only ever tried to help. Look what these women did to the poor children.’”
The words land heavy because I can hear Evelyn delivering them, every syllable polished.
I sink onto the couch, my knees unsteady. The springs sag under my weight with a soft groan. Riley stays on the stool, looking down at me over the web of string.
“So we can’t be sloppy,” I say. “We can’t just leak everything and hope the truth floats.”
“We pick cases,” she says. “Ones where the birth families want answers, where the adoptees are adults who can consent to being part of this. We anchor everything we say to documents, not just patterns. Then we use the Mercer name as the hook, not the whole story.”
I rub my hands over my face, palms rough against the tightness there.
“And we accept that some people will call us monsters,” I add. “For touching families they think are fine.”
“Fine is relative,” she says. “Growing up loved with a lie center stage still messes with your head. Trust me.”
The silence that drops after that is thick. The hum of the fluorescent light, the faint music from the salon below, the distant blast of a ship’s horn from the harbor—all of it presses in.
“Where do we start?” I ask.
“We start where your lives intersect theirs,” she says. “Otherwise you’re just a rich daughter-in-law with a grudge. We use your vantage point, not just mine.”
She climbs down from the stool and pulls a smaller corkboard out from behind the couch. This one is less crowded, newer. My own face stares up from one corner in a printed photo, next to a copy of my birth record Riley sent me in that first terrifying email.
“This is the Hannah board,” she says. “I haven’t let it merge with the big one yet. Too many unstable connections.”
My gaze drops to the center. A hospital logo. Harbor Glen Memorial. The Mercer crest again, that same wave pattern that smiles down from donor walls and embossed stationery and the gates of the estate.
A yellow string runs from the crest to a photocopy of an old staff roster. Names in tiny print crowd the page. A neon sticky note marks one line in blue ink: COLE, MARIA – MATERNITY, PER DIEM.
My mother.
Another string connects that sticky note to a typed record labeled CASE 14B—MATERNITY DISCHARGE DISCREPANCY. The date on the record punches the air out of my lungs.
“That’s my birthday,” I say. My voice scrapes.
“Close,” Riley says quietly. “Hospital says you were discharged two days later. The discrepancy is what happened in between.”
I stare at the date until the numbers swim.
“We can’t go further on this without her,” I say. “My mother. She’s the only one who can tell me what she signed, what she was told, what she lost.”
Riley nods.
“I know,” she says. “I’ve been waiting for you to say it.”
I look back at the big board, at the seven kids orbiting the boating accident, at the dozens of faces tied to the hospital where the air smells like disinfectant and coffee and the Mercers’ idea of mercy. The weight of all those stories presses on my chest, but underneath it something else pushes back: a stubborn, rising refusal to let Evelyn’s narrative be the only one that survives.
“We do this carefully,” I say. “We don’t just detonate and walk away. We build a path for the people on that wall, not just a headline for the gala.”
“Agreed,” Riley says. “But careful doesn’t mean gentle, Hannah. It means precise.”
I nod, the motion small but solid.
“Then I start with the person who tried to keep me safe by staying quiet,” I say. “I go home.”
The word hangs in the air between us, suddenly complicated. Home. The Mercers’ glass house above the cliffs. My mother’s cramped New Jersey apartment. The town of Harbor Glen with its boat parades and donor walls.
Somewhere under all of that, a file marked CASE 14B waits in a metal drawer that still smells like hospital air.
I stand and reach for my bag.
“Come with me?” I ask.
Riley hesitates, then shakes her head.
“Not for this first part,” she says. “She needs to see you, not an investigator with a map full of stolen kids. I’ll keep working this side. You bring back whatever truth she can stand to say out loud.”
I swallow, nod, and glance one last time at the web of strings converging on the Mercer crest.
The board doesn’t move. The hospital in the center doesn’t budge. But under my skin, something that’s been frozen since the first night at the estate shifts and cracks.
The next step is not toward the gala, or the journalist, or even Evelyn.
The next step is toward my mother’s door and the question that could redraw my place on that map—or pin me to it forever.