“They are my children,” I said, tears hot against my eyelids.

“They are Carters,” he replied. “And they are coming home to me.”

The line went dead.

I stared at the blank screen of my phone.

“He’s going to move her,” I told Martha.

“He knows she won’t survive a transfer to a state ward.”

Martha walked over to the kitchen table and began sorting through the papers I had already gathered.

“We need to find another way to prove what happened at the clinic in 1987,” she said.

“If we can’t get the official records, we need a witness.”

I sat down opposite her, the weight of the court order pressing on my chest.

“The clinic staff from thirty-seven years ago are likely gone or paid off,” I said.

“Daniel’s father was very thorough.”

I pulled my mother’s old personal diary from my bag.

It was a small, leather-bound book with frayed corners.

Inside the back cover, my mother had tucked a yellowed hospital admission slip from her first night at the clinic.

The ink had faded to a pale brown, but the signature at the bottom was still legible.