Chapter 5: Hannah’s Name
I waited until Daniel’s footsteps had crossed the kitchen and the front door shut behind him before I let myself move.
The car at the curb was still running. Its windshield reflected the gray morning sky; the driver’s face was a blur behind it. I drew the curtains across Leo’s window, then checked the street again through a narrow gap.
The car remained.
In the folder, behind the placement card, I found a thin receipt I hadn’t noticed before. It was from a pharmacy on Lark Avenue, stamped with the date June was born. The address was in the South Ward, a few blocks from the closed community clinic I remembered passing near the hospital’s old maternity annex—the annex with the chipped green door in the photograph Leo had matched.
It wasn’t proof Hannah would be there. It was the first lead that didn’t require asking Graham for anything.
Daniel appeared in the kitchen doorway. He looked as if he hadn’t slept.
“Where are you going?”
“I need to pick up the prescription they forgot to put in the discharge bag.” I tucked the receipt into my pocket. “I’ll take June. Leo can stay with Mrs. Alvarez for a little while.”
His gaze moved to the folder on the counter.
“Why not let me go?”
“Because I need to ask the pharmacist a question.”
He held my eyes for a beat too long. Then his phone buzzed, and he glanced down.
“Fine,” he said. “Don’t be long.”
I wanted to ask whether Graham had called. I wanted to ask what Daniel had meant when he said the placement was arranged. Instead, I went upstairs and dressed June in a soft sleeper, wrapping her in the pink blanket. I slipped my phone into my coat with the bracelet photograph open and ready. I brought no papers, no folder, no copy of the consent form. Just the picture of the number that didn’t belong.
Leo watched me buckle June into her carrier.
“Are we going to find her?”
“I don’t know.”
He frowned, hurt by the answer. I touched his shoulder.
“But I’m going to listen.”
At Mrs. Alvarez’s, he clung to my coat while she opened the door. She didn’t ask questions. She simply crouched to Leo’s height and offered him a warm cinnamon roll on a napkin.
“You can help me decide if it needs more sugar,” she said.
Leo looked back at me.
“I’ll come get you soon,” I promised.
His fingers loosened from my sleeve, one at a time.
The South Ward smelled of wet pavement and yesterday’s coffee. I walked past the pharmacy on the receipt, then followed Lark Avenue to the clinic. Its metal shutters were pulled down, and a notice on the door said it had closed for the day. A plastic bag skittered along the curb in the wind.
A woman stood beneath the narrow awning, holding a paper cup between both hands. She looked up when I approached.
Her face was pale, her eyes swollen. When she saw the pink blanket around June, the cup slipped in her fingers.
“No,” she whispered.
I stopped a few feet away. June stirred against my chest.
“Are you Hannah?”
The woman’s mouth trembled. She looked at the baby, then at me.
“You’re Mara.”
The words landed like a hand against my sternum.
“You called me.”
“I did.” Hannah lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry the call ended. He was there.”
“Who?”
She swallowed.
“Graham.”
The traffic on the avenue hissed past us. I tightened my arms around June, feeling the warm rise and fall of her breathing beneath the blanket.
Hannah stared at that small fold of pink fabric.
“I bought one like that,” she said. “Before she was born. I thought I’d bring it to the hospital.”
My throat tightened. “You’re June’s mother?”
“Yes.”
She said it without pleading or apology. Just the truth, stripped bare.
I felt fear rise in me—hot and selfish and immediate. Then I saw her hands shaking around the empty cup, and the fear changed shape. It didn’t vanish. It had to make room.
“I need to know what happened,” I said.
Hannah glanced toward the clinic door, then down the street. Her shoulders stayed rigid, as if she expected someone to call her name from behind us.
“I agreed to meet with Graham about placing my baby,” she said. “I thought I could do it. I thought it was the safest choice for her.” She closed her eyes briefly. “Then I changed my mind.”
“When?”
“The night before she was born. I told him I wasn’t going through with it. I said I wanted my daughter.”
Her voice caught on the last word. She steadied herself, then reached into her coat and drew out a folded piece of paper.
“I kept this.”
It was a printout of a message. The date was clear. So was the time: 11:42 p.m., the night before June’s birth.
I withdraw my consent. I am keeping my baby. Do not come back.
Below it was Graham’s name.
I read it twice. My fingers went numb at the edges of the paper.
“You sent this to him?”
“Yes. He answered that I was tired and confused. That I could speak to him in the morning.” Her gaze settled on June. “I told him there would be no morning meeting. I was done.”
“You withdrew before Daniel came to the room?”
Hannah’s expression tightened at my husband’s name.
“Yes.”
The clinic shutters rattled in the wind. June made a tiny sound beneath the blanket, and Hannah flinched as though the cry had touched a bruise.
“I heard her,” she whispered. “I heard my baby crying. I told Daniel to stop.”
A shiver ran through me, but I didn’t look away.
“Did you know him before that night?”
“I’d seen him with Graham once. Graham said he was the prospective father. He said Daniel understood that everything was still being worked out.” She shook her head. “I told Daniel I had changed my mind. I told both of them.”
I had expected a defense. A confusion. A story in which the terrible thing had happened by accident.
Hannah’s face held none.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and the words felt far too small.
She watched me cradle June. “You love her.”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t make her yours.”
“No.” My voice broke on the word. I pressed my cheek to June’s soft cap, just long enough to feel her warmth. “It doesn’t.”
Hannah wiped her face with the heel of her hand. Then she looked down the street again.
“I have to go.”
“Where are you staying?”
Her fingers closed around the printed message.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It matters if Graham is looking for you.”
“He already found me.” She drew a battered phone from her coat pocket, its screen dark. “He has my original phone. My messages, my contacts, the address I gave him when I thought he was helping me.”
May you like
She looked straight at me.
“He knows where I’m staying.”
