Chapter 4 - THE EMBRYO THAT WAS NEVER DESTROYED
Our attorney, Rachel Stern, moved faster than Northstar expected. By the next morning she had sent preservation demands to the clinic, the embryo-storage company, the genetic-testing laboratory, and Margaret personally. She told us not to accuse anyone publicly, not because the matter was unimportant but because evidence disappeared fastest when people realized criminal lawyers might eventually read it.
The objective was simple: establish whether B-17 had ever been destroyed.
The genetic laboratory provided the first answer. Four years earlier it had tested five embryos from our cycle. The report Northstar gave us listed three as abnormal, but the laboratory’s original result showed something different.
B-17 had been euploid.
Normal.
B-18 and B-20 were abnormal.
B-19 was normal.
B-21 produced an inconclusive result.
Somebody altered the report before Daniel and I received it.
I read the two versions side by side until the numbers stopped looking real. We had not lost three embryos. We had been told one healthy embryo was unusable when it was not.
The storage company provided another clue. It had never received a destruction authorization for B-17. Instead, twelve days after the genetic report, Northstar transferred B-17 into a restricted sub-account identified only as BENNETT FAMILY HOLD.
The person who requested the transfer was not Daniel.
It was Margaret.
Her authority came from a healthcare and financial power of attorney Daniel had signed years earlier when his father became ill and Daniel began managing multiple family entities. The power did not clearly authorize reproductive decisions, but Northstar accepted it.
“What about me?” I asked.
There was no power of attorney from me.
That was where the forged consent became necessary.
The mid-chapter reward gave us the basic mechanism: Margaret used Daniel’s broad authority and a false signature from me to remove a healthy embryo from our ordinary account and hide it inside a restricted family sub-account.
The complication was that Northstar had not acted blindly.
Someone at the clinic had approved the arrangement.
The medical director at the time was Dr. Samuel Kline, an old friend of Margaret’s late husband. He retired eighteen months earlier.
Rachel contacted him.
Kline initially claimed he remembered nothing about individual embryos. Then she mentioned BENNETT FAMILY HOLD, and he immediately asked whether Margaret was being sued.
That reaction was enough.
We met him in his Connecticut home with his lawyer present.
Kline admitted Margaret approached him after our third failed transfer. She was convinced I would eventually stop treatment and worried Daniel would never have children. Kline told her that reproductive decisions belonged to Daniel and me.
Margaret came back with documents.
Daniel’s power of attorney.
My supposed signed instruction.
A letter claiming we wanted one embryo retained separately for possible gestational use within the family.
Kline approved the transfer into restricted storage.
“Did you ever speak to me?” I asked.
“No.”
“Daniel?”
“No.”
“Then why approve it?”
His expression tightened. “Margaret had been a major donor to Northstar’s research foundation.”
Money had entered the story.
Not as Margaret’s motive.
As the reason other people stopped asking questions.
Kline insisted he never approved Vanessa’s eventual transfer. By then he had retired. Another physician processed it.
Dr. Lillian Moore.
Rachel scheduled an interview.
Before it happened, Moore’s office notified us that she had been placed on administrative leave.
Northstar had discovered something in the electronic record.
The consent bearing my signature had been uploaded from an external account.
Margaret’s personal assistant.
Then a second document surfaced.
An email from Margaret to Dr. Moore three months before Vanessa’s transfer.
Amy has accepted that motherhood is no longer part of her life. Daniel cannot bring himself to destroy the embryo. Vanessa is the solution all three of them need, even if Amy prefers not to participate emotionally.
I read the sentence twice.
Margaret had not merely hidden an embryo.
She had written me out of my own reproductive decision by describing my absence as consent.
Then Rachel showed us the attachment.
A letter supposedly from me.
I do not wish to be contacted regarding the transfer.
The signature was mine.
May you like
The words were not.
The mystery had moved from manipulation to deliberate forgery.
