Chapter 7

Dorcas did not speak in the car.

Desmond did not make her. He sat beside her with his phone dark in his hand, and when the driver stopped at a red light he said only, “Dorcas.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Not yet.”

He didn’t. A few minutes later his phone lit up and he read it without comment. Then, quietly: “David confirms the filing is real.”

“The filing is real,” Dorcas said. “The signature isn’t.”

The penthouse was on the fortieth floor and looked like no one lived in it. White walls, grey sofas, the whole city laid out below. Desmond opened a door at the end of the hall.

“This is yours.”

It was a bedroom with its own bathroom and a desk by the window. Her plastic hospital bag looked absurd on the bed.

“I need four things,” she said.

“Go on.”

“A key of my own. Nobody comes into this room without knocking, including you. I want to see anything that has my name on it before it is signed, filed or sent.”

“Done.”

“And a job.”

“You have a position at Allen Corporation. It’s in the agreement.”

“I don’t want a title. I want work.”

“What can you do?”

“Read. Find what’s wrong with a page.” She looked at him. “You saw me read your contract.”

“There’s a pass waiting for you at reception on Monday. Nine o’clock.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t be late,” he said.

It was almost a smile. He closed the door, and she heard his steps go away down the hall.

She waited until they were gone before she sat down at the desk and let her hands start to shake.

She opened her phone and found the three photographs from the hospital. The forged signature. The date. The purple stamp. She laid her real signature from the marriage contract beside it on the screen and enlarged both.

She already knew about the D. Hers stayed open. This one closed. But there was more, once she knew where to look. The forged line leaned too evenly. Hers always sagged at the end.

Then the stamp. Every notary stamp she had ever seen carried a commission expiry date. This one didn’t.

Then the date. She counted back nine months on her phone calendar. A Saturday.

She dug through her handbag for her wallet and pulled out a creased paper card from the back: HALCYON PRIVATE CLINIC, DIRECTED DONOR RECORD. A donor number. A barcode. Fourteen rubber stamps down the side, each with its own serial number. The clinic had made her bring it every time. She ran her finger down the dates.

There it was. The Saturday on the waiver. Fourteen Saturdays in eleven months, and the one that mattered was one of them. A purple stamp, a serial number, a nurse’s initials, and a line in biro: Directed donation. Dorcas S., 450 ml. Recipient: E.

Any court could check those serial numbers against the clinic’s logs. If the logs still existed. Looking at the dates now, she wondered why nobody had ever told her that fourteen donations in eleven months was too many.

On the day she supposedly signed away her child, she had been two rooms away from Emily, giving blood.

Someone knocked. She almost jumped out of her chair.

“Dorcas?” Desmond’s voice, through the door. “I’ve left a tray outside. I won’t come in.”

His footsteps retreated. She opened the door a crack. Soup, bread, a glass of water. She ate all of it standing at the window.

Then she went back to the desk.

She made herself go back further. The same clinic. Halcyon. She had given blood there fourteen times, and it was Halcyon that Isaiah had picked for the other thing too.

He had found it ten months ago, after she had told him she wanted a baby more than anything, and he had held her and said he knew a place. Private, discreet, no waiting lists. “They already know us,” he had said. Emily had recommended it too. Emily, who had held her hand in that waiting room in a yellow dress, and cried happy tears, and said Dorcas would be the best mother.

She remembered a waiting room with white orchids. A doctor in a pale blue coat who had said, warmly, that the embryo had been created from her own eggs and Isaiah’s sperm. A procedure under light sedation. And a stack of forms at the reception desk, which Isaiah had slid across with a pen, saying, “Insurance. Sign where I’ve marked. Don’t bother reading, it’s boring.”

She had signed where he marked. Eleven times, maybe twelve. She had not read one line.

She put her hand over her mouth.

Somewhere in that stack was the signature that became the waiver.

David’s trace would take days. She had a search box and a number.

A notary number belonged to somebody, and she wanted to know whom. She zoomed in until the digits were clear: NOTARY PUBLIC. Reg. No. 4471-B. She opened the national notary registry and typed it in.

The screen thought about it. She checked the digits twice, in case one wrong number changed everything. It didn’t.

A record appeared. Registration 4471-B. Holder: Halcyon Private Clinic (institutional registration). Status: REVOKED, twenty-one months ago.

A notary registration was one thing. A clinic was another. She opened the health regulator’s facility register in a second window and searched the clinic’s name.

Halcyon Private Clinic. Operating licence: REVOKED. Registered premises: CLOSED. Both dated twenty-one months ago, in the same week.

Dorcas screenshotted the page and emailed it to herself.

Twenty-one months. The waiver was dated nine. The clinic had been dead for a year before it notarised anything.

She had sat in that waiting room ten months ago. She had smelled the orchids.

She picked up the donor card and held it beside the screen, and the clinic’s name looked back at her from both.

A clinic that had officially stopped existing nearly two years ago had treated her, drained her, notarised her signature, and taken her son.