Chapter 6 - Blood in the Neonatal Unit
The pediatric intensive care unit at St. Jude’s smelled of antiseptic and ozone, a sterile quiet broken only by the rhythmic, electronic beeping of monitors.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass of Room 412, two uniformed police officers stood guard. Behind the glass, inside an incubator draped with blue thermal shields, lay a tiny human being. He weighed less than six pounds. Tubes no thicker than spaghetti strands ran into his paper-thin arms, and a miniature CPAP mask covered his tiny nose.
I stood with my palms pressed against the cold glass.
I had spent the last three years of my marriage visiting fertility clinics with Preston. I had endured hundreds of hormone injections, invasive procedures, and quiet, soul-crushing weeping in the middle of the night while Preston sighed with annoyance on the other side of our king-sized bed. He had always blamed me. *“The Callaway bloodline has never had fertility issues, Claire. You’re too stressed. You’re too obsessed with your work.”*
And now, here was a child born of deceit, abandoned by a ghost, rejected by the man who had traded his honor to claim him.
The door to the unit clicked open. A woman in dark blue surgical scrubs stepped out, pulling down her paper mask. Her badge read *Dr. K. Patel, Chief of Neonatology.*
“Ms. Vance?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, stepping away from the glass. Reese remained standing a few feet back, holding his legal briefcase, watching the corridor.
“The infant has severe neonatal sepsis,” Dr. Patel said without preamble. Her eyes were dark with exhaustion. “His white blood cell count is plummeting. We need to administer an experimental granulocyte transfusion, but because his legal mother is an unidentified fugitive and the putative father has officially filed a disavowal of paternity, the hospital’s legal counsel blocked the procedure unless an immediate blood relative assumes medical guardianship.”
“What does he need from me?” I asked.
“Your signature on the emergency temporary guardianship form,” Dr. Patel said, handing me a clipboard. “And a direct blood sample. We need to screen your human leukocyte antigens to ensure there’s no catastrophic immune reaction with the donor blood.”
I took the pen without hesitating for a single second.
“Claire,” Reese said quietly, stepping forward. His voice was gentle, but filled with warning. “If you sign that form, you are accepting legal and financial responsibility for this child. Edmund and Preston’s attorneys will use this to claim you were in collusion with Celeste Monroe from the beginning. They will argue in civil court that you orchestrated this entire fraud together.”
I looked through the glass at the tiny chest rising and falling beneath the incubator lights.
“Let them try, Reese,” I said.
I pressed the pen to the paper and signed my full legal name: *Claire Arthur Vance.*
Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in a small draw room down the hall, watching dark crimson blood fill three vacuum tubes from my arm. The nurse was taping a cotton ball over the crook of my elbow when the heavy double doors at the end of the corridor banged open against the wall.
“Where is she? Where is that scheming, treacherous bitch?”
It was Miriam Callaway.
She looked like a caricature of fallen royalty. Her blonde hair, usually sculpted into an immovable salon coif, was wild and stringy around her face. She was wearing an expensive cashmere wrap over silk pajamas, and her eyes were bloodshot, manic with fury. Behind her strode Edmund, flanked by two private security guards in dark suits.
“Miriam,” Edmund barked, grabbing her arm, but she ripped herself free with terrifying strength.
May you like
She stormed toward the draw room, her manicured finger pointing straight at my chest.
“You!” she shrieked, her voice echoing off the linoleum tiles. “You did this! You couldn't give my son an heir, so you found a street whore to plant a bastard on him! You planned this to steal our family’s money!”
