CHAPTER 18 — THE DOCTOR WHO CREATED MAYA
The clinic stood outside the city behind rusted gates and dead trees.
Flames burned through the eastern wing when police arrived.
I followed Morales through the smoke.
We found Beatrice near the lobby, striking a security guard with her cane.
“I delayed them,” she said.
“Where is Charles?”
“Downstairs.”
The hidden laboratory was beneath the building.
Charles stood beside an incinerator.
Dr. Adrian Wells, the fertility specialist who had performed the illegal transfer, was tied to a chair.
Stacks of records burned behind them.
Charles held a pistol.
“You always arrive after the difficult decisions,” he told me.
“Put the gun down.”
“Wells created this problem.”
Wells laughed weakly.
“You created the program.”
“I funded progress.”
“You sold children.”
Charles’s expression did not change.
Wells looked at me.
“Your father ordered Eleanor’s egg used because Sarah’s embryo failed.”
“I know.”
“No. You know part of it.”
He coughed from the smoke.
“Sarah’s embryo did not fail.”
Charles raised the gun.
Morales aimed at him.
“What happened to it?” I asked.
Wells continued.
“Charles wanted an embryo connected to someone he could control. Sarah’s embryo was transferred to another patient.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know her name. Records were coded.”
“Did the child survive?”
“Yes.”
There was another child created from Sarah and me.
A biological sibling to Maya.
Charles had stolen that embryo too.
“Where is the child now?”
Wells looked toward a locked cabinet.
“Charles knows.”
My father moved toward the incinerator controls.
Beatrice stepped between us.
“Enough.”
Charles aimed at his mother.
“You should have died years ago.”
Beatrice did not move.
“You mistook my silence for loyalty.”
“I learned from you.”
“No,” she said. “You learned my worst lesson and ignored every regret.”
Wells kicked the cabinet key across the floor.
I reached for it.
Charles fired.
The bullet struck the metal beside my hand.
Morales fired back.
Charles fell against the incinerator controls.
The gun slid away.
For several seconds, no one moved.
Then Charles began laughing.
“You think the cabinet gives you answers?”
I unlocked it.
Inside were adoption records.
The embryo created from Sarah and me had resulted in a girl born ten years before Maya.
Her adoptive parents were listed.
Thomas Reed and his late wife, Caroline.
Thomas had raised our biological daughter.
I stared at the name.
He had known.
He had stood beside me for years.
He had loved Sarah.
And he had raised the child Sarah and I believed we had lost.
The girl’s name was Lily Reed.
She was seventeen years old.
May you like
Then Charles whispered from the floor:
“Ask Thomas why Sarah chose him to be her father.”
