Chapter 5 - THE ROOM WITH TWO ULTRASOUNDSThe missing patient’s hospital room contained no personal belongings.
The bed remained warm. An IV line had been cut. A monitor strap lay across the floor.
The patient registration photograph showed a woman in her late thirties with pale scars near her jaw.
Natalie identified her immediately.
“Emily.”
Her sister had been alive less than two floors away.
The admission record described abdominal pain and a history of multiple pregnancy complications. The physician listed on the chart was Dr. Claire Wynn.
Hospital officials confirmed Wynn had entered the building using emergency privileges after Ava’s assault.
She was no longer present.
Security footage showed Emily walking through a laboratory corridor beside a woman in a surgical cap. The woman’s face remained hidden.
They entered an elevator marked for staff only.
No camera recorded them leaving.
Detective Ellis searched Emily’s room.
Inside a ceiling vent, she found a memory card wrapped in gauze.
The first video showed Emily speaking directly to Natalie.
“I am sorry I let you believe I died.”
She explained that a clinic employee rescued her from the garage fire. Lucas and Diane had left her unconscious, expecting the flames to destroy everything.
Emily awoke inside Maternal Continuity.
She wanted to contact Natalie.
Dr. Wynn told her Lucas had accused Natalie of starting the fire out of jealousy.
Emily believed it temporarily because sedatives and trauma had affected her memory.
By the time she understood the lie, she had delivered a daughter.
The clinic took the baby.
“They said the child needed protection from Lucas,” Emily said in the video. “They never told me where she went.”
Emily stayed inside the program to search for her.
She learned Lucas repeatedly targeted pregnant women with property, insurance or family trusts.
Maternal Continuity monitored him.
But it did not stop him.
It selected women whose pregnancies or assets could serve its own purposes.
Emily eventually began feeding Lucas false information through Diane, hoping to create evidence strong enough to expose him.
Ava’s name entered the network eighteen months earlier.
“Did she choose me?” Ava asked.
The next video answered.
“I argued against approaching Ava Morgan. Dr. Wynn overruled me.”
Ava had undergone fertility treatment at St. Catherine’s before conceiving naturally. During the treatment, two viable embryos were created.
She and Lucas agreed to destroy them after the marriage deteriorated briefly.
The clinic reported both embryos nonviable.
Emily discovered that one had been preserved.
A woman connected to Maternal Continuity received it.
Ava’s throat tightened.
“There could be another child genetically mine.”
The embryo transfer occurred eight months earlier.
The recipient was due to give birth within weeks.
The folder listed only a patient code:
M-SECOND
Lucas’s phrase returned to Ava.
I already have someone else.
Perhaps he had not meant only another lover.
He knew another woman carried a child created from Ava’s embryo.
If Ava and her unborn baby died, the second child could still inherit the family trust.
Whoever controlled that child would control twenty-two million dollars.
Detective Ellis searched the old clinic records.
The embryo transfer authorization contained Ava’s fingerprint.
She had never approved it.
The fingerprint likely came from forms she signed during treatment.
The recipient’s medical file had been removed minutes before the police raid.
Only two ultrasound images remained.
One showed Ava’s unborn daughter.
The other showed a fetus at nearly the same stage of development.
Both images were labeled A.M. BENEFICIARY.
Someone had prepared two children to hold the same legal identity.
Natalie examined the video’s final seconds.
Emily whispered:
“If I disappear again, do not trust the woman who claims she rescued me.”
The screen shifted.
A reflected face appeared in the dark window behind Emily.
Dr. Wynn.
Then another figure moved beside her.
The reflection belonged to Diane.
Diane was in police custody when the video was recorded.
May you like
Or investigators believed she was.
👉 A second woman wearing Diane’s face had been operating inside the clinic while the real mother-in-law sat in jail.
