Selena Kitt - Grace

When her mother announced, “He’ll see you now,” Leah and Rob stood together, holding hands, and Leah dared her mother with her eyes to say something, but she didn’t. Patty Wendt just waved them into another dark paneled room with a conference table in the middle surrounded by big leather upholstered chairs. Clearly, after the fiasco on Christmas, her mother had received the message loud and clear-Leah was nowhere near ready to “kiss and make up.”

Especially since she fully believed her mother had something to do with Grace’s kidnapping, even if she couldn’t prove it. Leah insisted on calling it a kidnapping, although everyone from her own mother to Erica to the doctor who had written her a prescription for sleeping pills had tried to dissuade her, even giving her helpful, alternative phrases like “forced-adoption” and “disappearance” and her favorite and her mother’s-”the mixup.”

“Leah, you’re looking well.” Donald smiled as reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat, pulling out a Bic ballpoint pen and slapping a yellow legal pad onto the desk.

Leah shrugged, not knowing what to say to that, considering the last time she’d seen him, she had been placed in four-point restraints and had so many sedatives and various other drugs in her system, she saw three of him walking into the hospital room, with three of her mother bringing up the rear.

“As I told you, we’ve fully cooperated with law enforcement, but they haven’t been much help,” Rob began, looking at Leah and squeezing her hand in reassurance.

Donald snorted, scribbling on his notepad. “I’m not surprised.”

“Neither am I,” Rob agreed with a sigh. “That’s why I hired a private investigator immediately, but so far, he’s been unable to turn up anything.”

“Nothing at all?”

Rob shook his head sadly. “It’s like she disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“Well, that’s unlikely.” Donald wrote something else down, frowning. “But if Leah’s recount of the story is accurate, and she really was coerced or forced into signing the adoption papers-”

“She tricked me!”

“Yes, well, if that’s the case, the social worker will have gone out of her way to put Grace somewhere inaccessible.”

“Far away?”

“Probably,” Donald agreed. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t get her back. It just means that private investigators aren’t going to be much help. We’re going to have to do this legally.”

Rob nodded. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Leah, I know it’s painful, but I want you to tell me again what happened. Everything you can remember about the day Grace was… the day she was-”

“Kidnapped.” Leah reached for a glass and the water pitcher sitting in the middle of the table, pouring and then sipping, giving herself time and the courage to go back to that day. It had only been a little over two weeks-two weeks! — but it felt like a lifetime.

Then Leah began to speak, slowly at first, then faster as the memories flooded in. She told him the facts-the social worker, a woman all the girls at Magdalene House had nicknamed “the ghoul,” had come in for her final visit that morning at the hospital. Leah had decided to keep her baby. She’d told the ghoul this in no uncertain terms, and Leah had naively believed the social worker had accepted this decision. Leah’s mother was due to come pick them up-Leah’s plan was to get on a bus to New York with her baby and start a new life.

That plan had come crashing down around her head, simply because she had been too naive to believe the social worker would do something so underhanded, so utterly heinous.

Leah told him the social worker had presented her with hospital discharge papers and asked her to sign them. She had been distracted, getting Grace ready to go, waiting for her mother to arrive, and she’d signed them without thinking after the ghoul told her what they were.

And that’s when all hell broke loose.

Leah remembered it only vaguely, even now. The sudden loss of her baby, the way Joan Goulden had lifted her right from her bassinette and walked out with her, the mass of doctors and nurses who had descended on Leah like a swarm of locusts straight out of the Bible, like they’d all just been waiting for that very moment. It was a well-orchestrated dance, all the moves pre-choreographed, steps those doctors and nurses had taken a hundred, a thousand times, restraining Leah and preventing her from running after the woman who had stolen her baby.

She related the story as matter-of-factly as she could, like Joe Friday said on Dragnet , revealing just the facts, ma’am, watching the lawyer writing everything down on the yellow legal pad, filling up one page and flipping to the next as she talked. Leah answered his questions when he had them, feeling her breath caught in her chest, shallow and light, her heart beating as fast as a bird’s.

She told him what happened, but it was the things she didn’t tell him that tore her apart. How sweet Grace’s little rosebud mouth had been when she made sucking motions in her sleep. How thick her dark hair had been, already curling around the tiny shell of her ear. How the baby’s hand had grasped her mother’s finger, those dark eyes tinted blue as they looked up into Leah’s face. How, the first instant she had looked into her baby’s face, she had fallen in love instantly, more completely and without any reserve, than she ever had or would again in her life.

Those things weren’t important, not to Donald Highbrow, even though, for Leah, they were the only things that mattered.

“You’re certain that Mrs. Goulden told you they were hospital discharge papers?”

“Yes.” Leah insisted. “She intentionally tricked me.”

“Were there any witnesses to that fact?”

“I don’t know.” Leah cocked her head, trying to remember. “There were no nurses in the room, but it wasn’t a private room. There were other girls with their babies. Someone might have overheard us.”

He nodded, taking more notes. “You were discharged that day, correct?”

“Yes. My mother arrived to take us home but… Grace was gone. And I went home with Rob.”

“But I understand you were readmitted to the hospital two days later?”

“She was…” Rob interjected, squeezing Leah’s hand again. “She had a little breakdown. We called our family doctor in, and after he made a house call, he felt it best to admit her overnight, so he could sedate her more fully… “

“Is that bad?” Leah swallowed shameful tears. “I didn’t mean to. I just… kind of… lost it…”

“I understand.” Donald Highbrow gave her a long, sympathetic look. “It wasn’t your fault. But I need to be honest with you, Leah. You have to understand, if we end up in court, they will use that against you.”

“I was hysterical with grief!” she protested,

“They will twist everything you said or did to fit their purpose,” he explained slowly. “You will be presented as an unwed mother, and that will be bad enough. Most courts would see you as unfit for that reason alone.”

“She won’t be an unwed mother for long,” Rob snapped. Leah saw his jaw working and knew he was angry-really angry.

Donald smiled sadly. “I can’t change the way the world works or how the judge will see things. If we end up in court, they will do everything in their power to show you as unfit, Leah, even if your circumstances have changed. I’ve gone through enough of these cases to know their tactics.”

“But I’m not unfit!” Leah choked, blinking back the tears that threatened.

“I know that,” the lawyer reassured her. “But even your overnight stay in the hospital could be used as proof that you’re mentally unstable.”