Chapter 9 - Hannah Calls Emily After Eighteen Months
The call came at 6:14 on a Tuesday morning.
Emily almost ignored the unknown number.
Then she heard breathing.
“Em?”
Emily sat on the floor.
“Hannah?”
Her sister began crying.
She was alive.
She was in Oregon.
After leaving the Maine recovery residence, Hannah changed her name temporarily and entered a trauma program.
She followed Lucas from a distance through public photographs of Adrian.
She knew he was safe.
She could not make herself return.
Emily did not tell her she should have.
She asked:
“Are you safe?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want us to know where you are?”
A long pause.
“Yes.”
Hannah agreed to speak first with her attorney and therapist.
Then with investigators.
Her account matched the records in crucial ways.
She had discovered the Northstar irregularities.
She had undergone a procedure she believed was diagnostic.
Weeks later, she learned she was pregnant.
Genetic testing eventually identified Adrian as the biological father.
She was horrified.
Not by Lucas.
By what had been done to both of them.
Hannah considered terminating the pregnancy but chose not to.
That choice was hers.
She loved Lucas.
She also experienced severe trauma around the circumstances of conception.
After birth, she felt incapable of caring for him safely.
She requested temporary placement.
Then Charles and Hale took control of the process.
Hannah signed some documents while heavily medicated.
Others were forged.
She did not knowingly sign away all parental rights.
Adrian listened to the recorded statement with tears in his eyes.
He had spent fourteen months believing Lucas’s mother was dead.
Lucas had spent fourteen months without the mother who was alive but traumatized and hidden.
No simple reunion could fix that.
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The next question was not who “deserved” Lucas.
It was how to build a safe relationship around the child.
