Her hand had been stiff from arthritis when she showed me, but she never forgot the pattern.
I started crying without warning.
Dana let me sit quietly until I could breathe again.
Then she asked whether I wanted to stop for the day.
I said no, but I needed to know what we could prove from these papers.
She listed the limited conclusions carefully.
Evelyn had received a baby through an agency connected to the clinic.
The agency recorded a transfer under a designation rather than a name.
Someone with initials M.Q. had connected a death-report instruction to that transfer.
Everything else required witnesses, authenticated records, or both.
Dana asked permission to contact the state vital records office and the agency’s successor organization.
I signed a limited authorization after reading each paragraph.
I did not want the search to become another process in which other people controlled my story while I sat outside a closed door.
Before I left, Dana gave me a small folder labeled Naomi Pierce, Personal Records.
It contained copies of everything we had examined and a checklist of requests.
I held it on the ride home as though it were something fragile and alive.
At the first traffic light, I received a call from an unlisted number.
The voice belonged to Martha Quinn.
She said she had told her lawyer to give me a message.
“The green cloth belongs to a woman named Ruth.”
I pulled into a parking lot.
“Who is Ruth?”
Martha breathed unevenly.
“The woman they told had lost her baby.”
Martha agreed to speak with me only in Dana’s office, with her attorney present and no recording beyond the one they all approved.
Her attorney, Samuel Frost, made it clear that she was not admitting criminal liability by answering questions about her former employment.
I agreed because I needed facts more than the pleasure of making her uncomfortable.
When Martha entered, she looked smaller than the woman I had faced in the hallway.
She kept her hands folded and would not meet my eyes.
I opened with the one question that mattered most to me.
“Why did you break into my house?”
She stared at the carpet.
“I was trying to take the envelope before Graham found it.”
“How would he know it was there?”
“He’d been watching your mother’s house since she died.”
Martha said she had worked at Alden Family Center for fifteen years, first as a receptionist and later as an administrator.
