Chapter 4
Rowan followed the stretcher through the emergency doors while the obstetrician searched desperately for the baby’s heartbeat. A faint rhythm returned, slow and unstable. Wren was taken directly to an operating room, where surgeons delivered her son by emergency cesarean section and controlled the hemorrhage caused by a partial placental abruption.
For forty-seven seconds, the newborn did not breathe.
A neonatal physician compressed his chest while another cleared his airway. Then the child released a thin cry. It was not loud, but everyone inside the operating room heard it.
Wren remained unconscious as her son was transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit. Her blood pressure stayed dangerously high for several hours before medication began bringing it under control.
Dax received twelve stitches in his arm and treatment for a concussion. Kira sat beside him in the emergency department wearing a hospital blanket over her bloodstained uniform. Neither spoke until Rowan entered and told them that Wren and the baby had survived.
Dax lowered his face into both hands. Kira closed her eyes.
“What about Gideon?” Dax asked.
“In custody.”
“And the body bags?”
“Empty.”
The three bags had been purchased two weeks earlier, along with the mannequin, signal jammer, restraints and recording equipment. Investigators found maps of rural ambulance districts inside Gideon’s farmhouse. He had marked response times, shift changes and distances from sheriff’s substations. Station 43 had not been chosen randomly. Gideon knew its ambulance could reach him before law enforcement.
A fireproof trunk lay hidden beneath the basement floor. The brass key attached to Gideon’s hospital identification card opened it.
Inside were falsified birth certificates, newspaper clippings about the disappearance of Evelyn Cross and maintenance schedules from St. Catherine’s maternity ward. Gideon had preserved every document from the night Wren was taken. There were also photographs of Wren at different ages, usually captured from a distance, as though Gideon had been documenting property rather than raising a child.
At the bottom of the trunk, Detective Lena Cho found a microcassette labeled MARA.
Mara Voss had been Gideon’s wife.
Rowan listened to the recording in a hospital conference room the following afternoon. Mara’s voice trembled beneath a steady mechanical hum.
“If anyone finds this, Gideon took that baby. I told him to return her, but he said the hospital owed us a daughter.”
Mara explained that her premature daughter, Elise, died at St. Catherine’s shortly after midnight. Gideon blamed the hospital because the obstetric emergency team had been treating another critically ill mother when Elise’s heart stopped. Doctors tried to save her, but Gideon became convinced that someone had deliberately chosen another baby over his own.
At 2:31 a.m., a localized electrical failure disabled the maternity ward’s cameras and triggered alarms in several newborn rooms. Gideon, who worked in facilities engineering, entered through a service corridor wearing his uniform.
He returned home before sunrise carrying a newborn girl wrapped in a yellow blanket.
Mara wanted to call police. Gideon threatened to accuse her of participating in the kidnapping. He controlled her money, disconnected the telephone and moved them repeatedly. When Mara attempted to escape with the child four years later, Gideon forced their truck off an icy road. Mara survived the crash long enough to make the recording but died before she could deliver it to authorities.
Gideon told Wren that Mara died while giving birth to her.
“Was the hospital negligent?” Rowan asked.
Detective Cho opened an archived medical report. “Elise had an undiagnosed heart defect. The review found that the team responded appropriately under the circumstances. Gideon’s claim that they intentionally abandoned his daughter wasn’t supported.”
“He built Wren’s entire life around a lie.”
“He built it around several.”
Hospital records showed that a storm caused a citywide outage earlier that night, but the maternity ward’s later failure had been deliberately created. Gideon shut down the backup circuit and triggered false equipment alarms. His actions placed six newborns at risk so he could take one.
Lydia Cross, Evelyn’s biological mother, had been sedated following an emergency delivery. By the time she woke, her daughter was gone.
She had never stopped searching.
Detective Cho located Lydia in Oregon and arranged a DNA test. The probability that she was Wren’s mother exceeded 99.99 percent.
The question became whether Wren wanted to meet her.
When Wren regained consciousness, Caleb Mercer was sitting beside her bed with their newborn son asleep against his chest. Gideon had attacked Caleb outside their apartment and locked him inside an abandoned storage unit. Caleb escaped after nearly two days by breaking through a damaged partition. He had spent every hour since then searching for Wren.
She touched the bandage near his temple. “I thought he killed you.”
“He tried.”
“I made the recording. He forced me to say you were hurting me.”
“I know.”
“You should hate hearing my voice say those things.”
Caleb placed their son carefully into her arms. “I hate the man who made you say them.”
They named the baby August because Wren wanted him to carry the name of the month in which their family survived.
Lydia arrived the next morning but stopped outside Wren’s room. She held a faded photograph of a newborn beneath a yellow blanket and looked terrified.
“What if she doesn’t want me?” Lydia asked Rowan.
“Then you give her time.”
“I’ve already lost nineteen years.”
“Wren lost them too. She needs choices now, not another person deciding what she owes.”
Lydia entered alone. She did not call Wren Evelyn or rush forward demanding an embrace. She sat beside the bed and placed the photograph between them.
“My name is Lydia,” she said. “I’ve searched for you since the morning you disappeared.”
Wren examined the picture. Near the infant’s right ear was the same crescent-shaped birthmark she had seen in the mirror all her life.
“Did you leave me there?”
“No.”
“Did you stop looking?”
“Never.”
Lydia opened a small case containing nineteen birthday cards, each addressed to Evelyn. Some had been written while Lydia believed her daughter might return as a child. The later cards had been addressed to a teenager, then to a young woman Lydia could only imagine.
Wren touched the oldest envelope but did not open it.
“I don’t know which name belongs to me.”
“Both can,” Lydia said. “Or neither. That decision is yours.”
Wren reached across the blanket. Lydia took her hand, and they remained that way without attempting to recover nineteen stolen years in a single conversation.
Outside, Detective Cho’s phone rang. She listened for several moments before finding Rowan near the nurses’ station.
“Gideon wants to confess,” she said.
“To the kidnapping?”
“To everything.”
Rowan looked through the glass at Wren, Lydia, Caleb and the sleeping infant.
“What does he want in exchange?”
“He wants Wren brought to him.”
“Absolutely not.”
Cho nodded. “That was my answer.”
“What does he claim she needs to hear?”
“He says everyone misunderstood why he chose her.”
Rowan remembered his words at the farmhouse.
It wasn’t supposed to be you.
May you like
Before she could respond, a nurse came running from Wren’s room. Lydia stood beside the empty bassinet, and Caleb was searching frantically beneath the hospital bed.
August was gone.
