Kate White - Hush

Finally, she closed her eyes, exhausted. She fell asleep and began to dream-about Amy. She and her daughter were walking by a body of water in a place she didn’t recognize. And then someone was trying to take Amy away, saying she wasn’t Lake’s child after all. But she looks just like me, Lake screamed, terrified of losing her.

Suddenly she was jerked awake, as if she were stumbling off a curb. A thought grew quickly in her mind, like a sponge dipped in water.

She knew what the letters meant.

SHE WOKE THE next morning to muffled kitchen sounds-running water, a pan scraping against a stovetop burner. In her foggy state she thought she was hearing Will in the kitchen, using the stove when he shouldn’t. But then she remembered where she was-and what had happened.

In the dim light from the living room windows, she located her purse and the sundress, then ducked into the powder room that Archer had pointed out last night. As she ran the water to wash her face, she checked her phone. There was an urgent message from Molly, finally responding to Lake’s call for help last night.

“Are you okay ?” she asked. “Call me.” The sound of her voice made Lake livid.

“Hey, you’re up,” Archer said as she stepped back into the living room. He was standing in the doorway from the kitchen, wearing a fresh dress shirt and a dark suit, no tie. “How about some break-k fast?”

“That would be great,” she said. She remembered that she hadn’t eaten dinner last night and her stomach was grumbling.

The kitchen fit Archer as well as the rest of the apartment did. Though the appliances were ultra-modern, the space was casual, homey-stacks of magazines and mail on the counter, postcards on the fridge, a bowl full of bananas on the round wooden table. There was a garden out back and the door was open so that a light breeze blew into the room.

“I’ve got English muffins, yogurt-plain or blueberry-granola, and a cereal called banana crunch that my stepson is addicted to but I think may contain massive amounts of sugar.”

Lake smiled. “Plain yogurt sounds good. And an English muffin. But you don’t have to wait on me. I can get it.”

“No, no, sit down. There’s coffee on the table.”

“Your place is great,” Lake said, sliding into a chair. “How long have you lived here?”

“About five years. When I was married, my wife insisted on doing the whole Upper East Side thing, which never really thrilled me. I found this place right after we split, and it’s been great. There’s a little study upstairs and a room for Matt, my stepson. In fact, he lived here the whole year I was working in Washington.”

“What’s he like?”

“A real good guy,” he said, setting her yogurt down. “Twenty-two. Now at Columbia Law. How about some sliced banana with that? As you can see, I’m flush with those. My housekeeper clearly thinks I’m suffering from a potassium deficiency.”

She smiled again and poured a mug of coffee for herself. “No, this is fine.”

After toasting and buttering the muffin, he slid the plate in front of her and pulled out a chair for himself at the table. This is all so weird, she thought. He’s the only man besides Jack that I’ve sat across the breakfast table from in nearly fifteen years.

“We need to make a plan,” he said firmly. Suddenly the no-nonsense Kit Archer was back.

“I know-and I have to get home,” she said. “I need to feed my poor cat.” And yet what if the man from the park was keeping an eye on her building now?

“Where’s your place?”

“The Upper West Side.”

“I thought I’d drive home with you and make sure you got back okay. I’ll head to work from there.”

“Look, you don’t-”

“Stop. There’s no way I’m going to just let you go home alone-not after what happened last night.”

She felt relieved knowing he’d be with her.

“Thank you.”

“That’s just step number one. From there you need to call this nurse you mentioned-as soon as possible. But is there any chance she could be involved?”

Lake shook her head. “At this point I don’t feel sure of anything, but Maggie seems like a pretty guileless person.”

“Okay, then, explain to her what happened to you. Let her know how serious the situation is and that you need her help.”

“I’ll do my best to convince her.”

“Good. How long has she worked there?”

“About three years, I think. She’s the one Keaton had given his keys to so she could pick up his mail.”

“It’s not going to be easy to get her to betray her bosses,” Archer said. He tapped his lips lightly with his fist. “I wish we had some kind of proof to offer her-a way to legitimize your story.”

“I think I have something,” Lake said softly. “Not actual proof, but a strong indication that the clinic used Alexis’s embryos on someone else-and is doing it with other patients as well.”

He raised his chin, expectant.

“I think I know what the letters mean.”

“You’re kidding,” he said, astonished. “Tell me.”

“It seems so obvious now, but it wasn’t until I was lying in the dark last night and saw them in my mind that I figured it out. I think the first letters refer to hair color- BR for brown, BL for blond, R for red, and BK for black, maybe, though I never saw that one. The second set is for eye color- b for blue, br for brown again, g for green.”

Archer stared at her, incredulous.

“Geez. Because that way-”

“-they do the best job of matching. Keeping track of a couple’s coloring isn’t necessary for medical purposes, and even if it was, why be so cryptic about it? But if the clinic is stealing embryos and transferring them to other women, it would be important to have that information. You’d want to make sure that the baby had coloring similar to its parents. The first indication that a child might not be yours would be if the coloring were totally off. From what I know it’s fairly rare for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child-and many people just assume it’s not possible at all.”

“Right-blue eyes are a recessive trait.”

“If the coloring is really off, a couple might start asking questions. They might even get a DNA test for their peace of mind. And if there’s a discrepancy, they’re going to panic and demand an explanation.”

“But what happens when the kid gets older and his features don’t fit so well with his parents’?”

“If the coloring works, it may not seem like such a big deal. And by then there’s total attachment. Even if the parents have reason to be suspicious, they may not want to rock the boat.”

“Yeah, let sleeping dogs lie. And you just figured all this out last night, lying on my couch?”

Lake smiled. “I think my subconscious has been working on it for a while. When I spoke to Alexis, she made a point of saying that the baby she saw with Melanie Turnbull matched Melanie’s coloring perfectly. That comment has been playing in my brain somewhere ever since.”

Archer shook his head in disgust. “And all just to improve their success rates. Do you think all the doctors could be in on it?”

She thought of Steve and felt a pang of worry.

“I don’t know,” she said. She took a sip of coffee. “It’s possible that only a few people are involved and doing it without the others being aware. The nurses, for instance, could be totally in the dark.”

“Wouldn’t they be curious about the codes?”

“They might not notice them because they only appear on the basic information sheet that patients fill out in the beginning, not on the medical forms that get used later. Once a patient is under treatment, the focus would be on notations made about procedures, that sort of thing.”