Chapter 11 - THE CHILD IN DR. REYES’S HOUSEPolice reached the Reyes residence within minutes.
Dr. Reyes remained at the hospital with Chloe while Detective Morgan supervised through a secure call.
Her mother, Margaret Reyes, opened the door carrying a six-year-old girl wrapped in a blanket.
The child called herself Ivy.
She had arrived before dawn with Wren, who told Margaret that Elena would protect her.
Wren left immediately.
“Did she say where she was going?” Claire asked.
“To finish something at Meridian.”
The old maternity center had already been searched.
But Meridian’s public building was only one part of the original campus.
Margaret remembered underground service tunnels connecting it to a former convent across the road.
Continuity may have preserved another facility there.
Ivy’s medical bracelet identified her as a patient at a psychiatric residential program. Her records claimed severe aggression and delusional attachment to strangers.
In person, she was frightened, exhausted, and careful not to move without permission.
“What happens if you disobey?” Lauren asked later at the hospital.
Ivy touched the back of her neck.
“They change my family.”
She had lived with four different couples in two years.
Each household taught her a new history.
In one, her mother was dead.
In another, her mother was dangerous.
In the most recent, she was told Wren was an imaginary friend.
Wren worked as a teenage helper inside the residence and secretly taught Ivy her original surname.
Ellis.
Nora stared at the screen.
Ivy was her half-sister.
Their mother had given birth while Nora remained trapped in the Continuity system. Nora believed the baby died.
The program had used the same false-death method repeatedly.
Dr. Reyes’s connection to the house troubled Detective Morgan.
“Why did Wren choose your mother?”
Elena looked toward Chloe.
“My family has a Meridian history too.”
Her father worked as an anesthesiologist at the maternity center. He died in the fire that supposedly closed it.
Margaret Reyes later admitted he had preserved original patient files before the fire.
Wren must have known those files were hidden in the house.
Police searched the attic.
They found sixteen boxes of Meridian records, infant photographs, and physician correspondence.
One letter came from Malcolm Voss.
The Continuity model requires physicians willing to distinguish a child’s factual history from the family history necessary for stability.
Elena’s father had written across it:
A lie does not become treatment because a doctor prescribes it.
He planned to expose the program.
The fire began two days later.
Dr. Reyes stared at the letter.
“My father was killed because he tried to stop them.”
The records included the original delivery reports for Savannah, Lila, Chloe, Wren, Nora, and Ivy.
They also identified the Continuity founder.
Not Thomas.
Not Voss.
A psychologist named Dr. Helen Carr.
Helen believed children recovered better when removed permanently from unstable biological families and placed into carefully designed households.
Thomas transformed the theory into a service for wealthy clients.
Voss provided medicine and false records.
Judges provided authority.
But Helen had created the system.
She was listed as deceased.
Her signature appeared on Ivy’s placement order from the previous month.
Another dead founder remained active.
Dr. Reyes’s phone displayed a message from Wren.
Helen is coming to the hospital. She wants Chloe before Rachel changes her memory.
Security checked every entrance.
No woman matching Helen Carr had entered.
Then Diane stood from her chair in the family waiting room.
Her posture changed.
The fearful mother disappeared.
She removed a small hearing device from beneath her hair and placed it on the table.
Chloe stared at her.
Diane looked directly toward the camera.
“Rachel has already contaminated Clara’s narrative.”
Detective Morgan stepped closer.
“Diane?”
The woman smiled.
“That was the name Thomas gave me.”
Dr. Reyes opened the founder photograph from the attic records.
A younger Helen Carr looked back with Diane’s eyes.
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The mother who claimed fear had kept her silent was the psychologist who designed Continuity.
👉 Diane was not merely Thomas’s accomplice—she was the presumed-dead founder who had built the system around the girls’ stolen identities.
