Chapter 6 - The SearchWhat followed was five weeks that I genuinely do not know how I survived, except that I had Eli, and I had Rosalind, and I had Detective Oyelaran's team working a case that, once the hospital's own compliance office got involved, turned out to be considerably larger than one baby and one desperate father.
The woman in the gray coat was identified through hospital security footage — footage the network had apparently believed nobody would think to request for a baby whose death certificate had already been filed. Her name was Delphine Waskowski, a former labor and delivery nurse who'd been quietly running placements for over three years, working with a small circle of hospital staff willing to falsify documentation for cash, matching desperate or coerced parents with wealthy families willing to pay enormous, undocumented fees to skip years of legal adoption waitlists.
Our daughter had been placed, seventeen days after her birth, with a couple two states away who had, according to everything investigators later confirmed, no idea the child they'd paid for had been taken under false pretenses. They had been told, and apparently believed, that she was a legal private adoption from a birth mother who wished to remain anonymous.
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I will not pretend the legal process of getting her back was simple, quick, or free of its own particular grief. The family who had been raising her for those five weeks loved her already, in the specific, fierce way people love a baby they believe is theirs, and untangling that took courts, DNA testing, and more lawyers than I ever wanted to meet.
But five weeks and two days after I woke up in that hospital bed and asked where my daughter was, I held her again. Really held her. Alive, warm, furious at being handed to yet another stranger, screaming the specific, healthy scream of a baby who had, it turned out, never stopped fighting to survive at all.
