Chapter 4
Chapter 5 - The Page That Wasn't There
I called Northwestern Memorial the next morning and asked for the full record on Lily Bennett, born March 3, 2018.
I had to say it twice.
The woman in medical records told me I could request the file but it would take five to seven business days, and I told her I would wait, because I had already waited eight years without knowing what was in it.
I still had my own copy at home.
I had kept it in a plastic sleeve in the closet since the spring of 2018 — every NICU note, every feeding log, every page they handed me while Lily was in that incubator with the tape on her face.
That night after Lily was in bed, I laid the old copy out on the dining room table and went through it page by page.
No Alan Whitmore.
No transfer page.
No second infant.
The Lily I brought home was the only baby on every sheet in that sleeve.
The new record arrived the following Thursday.
I opened the envelope standing up in the kitchen with my coat still on.
There it was, twenty-two pages in, stapled between the delivery summary and the first neurology consult.
A transfer page from the maternity ward to the NICU.
Delivering physician: Dr. Alan Whitmore.
Underneath that, in the same clean type, a line I had never seen in my life:
Infant 1 of 2.
I sat down on the kitchen floor.
I want to be honest about that, because I am not a woman who sits on kitchen floors.
I sat there for a long time with the pages in my lap and looked at the word two.
David came home at six-thirty and found me at the table with the pages fanned out in front of me.
"What is this?" he asked.
"This is Lily's hospital record," I said.
"All of it."
He looked at the page.
He did not look surprised.
He looked scared, and my husband is not a man who scares easily.
He ran his hand over his mouth the way he does when he is about to say something he has been holding.
"My father handled the paperwork," he said.
"What?"
"In 2018.
That week."
He would not sit down.
"I was in the car accident that Tuesday, remember?
The one on Sheridan.
I was on painkillers for ten days.
I couldn't sign anything, I could barely hold a pen.
My father drove up from the city and he told me he'd take care of the hospital stuff so I could focus on you and Lily."
"So you never read the file."
"I read what he told me to read," David said.
"He said there was nothing in it I needed to worry about."
I asked him if he had ever heard the name Alan Whitmore.
He shook his head, and I believed him, because his face went the color of old paper.
I called Jo Delacroix at nine that night.
She answered on the second ring like she had been waiting for me to.
I told her the name was in the file.
"It would be," she said.
"Whitmore lost his license in 2021.
The state medical board pulled it.
He kept it quiet, and the hospital kept it quieter, because he was on staff there for nineteen years."
I asked her if she knew why his name would be on my daughter's transfer page.
"I know he signed a lot of pages in that unit," she said.
"I know your father-in-law was on the hospital board at the time.
I know those two things sat in the same building for years, and I know I stopped sleeping right about then."
After I hung up, I opened the folder of copies Jo had given me at the diner — the intake page, the room log, and one grainy color photo she had taken of the NICU hallway in the spring of 2018, because she said she used to take pictures of the window decorations for the families.
I had looked at that photo three times already and seen nothing but a hallway.
That night I zoomed in with both hands on the phone, and I saw the nursery glass at the end of the corridor, and in the reflection of the glass, a man in a dark coat walking away from the ward.
He was carrying a car seat.
There was a baby in it.
I know my father-in-law's coat.
I have seen that coat at every family dinner for twelve years, and I have seen that walk, that stiff way he moves when he does not want to be looked at.
May you like
I sat at the kitchen table until almost two in the morning with the phone face-down in front of me, and I did not wake David, and I did not call anyone, because I needed to know one thing before I said a word to any Bennett in this family.
I needed to know where that baby went.
