Chapter 8 - THOMAS REED
Thomas Reed was not difficult to find.
He was difficult to persuade to speak.
Rachel contacted him first.
He refused.
Then Daniel called.
Thomas hung up.
Diane tried.
Nothing.
Finally Emily called him.
He agreed to a video conversation with attorneys present.
Thomas looked older than I remembered from a photograph Vanessa once showed me.
He also looked terrified.
“Did you take Emily’s transfer paperwork to St. Matthew?”
“Yes.”
“Did you take an infant bracelet?”
“Yes.”
My stomach tightened.
“Why?”
“Hospital protocol requested the identification materials prepared for transfer.”
“But the transfer was canceled.”
“Yes.”
“Then why bring them?”
“Because the cancellation happened after the receiving packet had been assembled. I was told to deliver the amended packet.”
“By whom?”
“The physician.”
Reasonable.
“What happened at St. Matthew?”
Thomas looked away.
“I gave the packet to admissions.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
Vanessa suddenly interrupted.
“You’re lying.”
Thomas’s face changed.
There was history there.
“What happened?” I asked.
He looked at Vanessa.
“Tell them.”
She said nothing.
Thomas laughed bitterly.
“Still doing that.”
“Thomas.”
“No.”
He looked directly into the camera.
“Vanessa followed me to the hospital.”
Daniel turned toward her.
“What?”
Vanessa’s face drained.
Thomas said she was grieving and obsessed with the possibility that the clinic had caused the baby’s death.
She wanted to see where the infant would have been transferred.
“I told her to go home.”
“Did she?”
“No.”
She entered St. Matthew with him.
Two days before I gave birth.
That explained how Vanessa knew the maternity floor.
Not what happened afterward.
Thomas continued.
Vanessa saw the Bennett bracelet inside the transfer packet.
She took it.
Vanessa shouted, “That’s not true!”
Thomas didn’t flinch.
“You put it in your purse.”
“Why would I do that?”
“You said Emily deserved something that had touched her baby.”
Diane covered her mouth.
Vanessa stared at Thomas.
Then her shoulders dropped.
“I forgot.”
I felt anger rise.
“No. You hid it.”
She looked at me.
“I was grieving.”
“Then how did Daniel get it?”
Vanessa closed her eyes.
She had kept the bracelet.
Months later, after Daniel and I were married but before Lily was born, she visited our house for a family gathering.
She left the bracelet in Daniel’s study after seeing our ultrasound photograph.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
I did.
Jealousy had started earlier than anyone admitted.
Daniel found the bracelet only after the hospital nurse contacted him, and assumed it came from St. Matthew.
In reality, Vanessa had planted it.
The entire hospital-bracelet mystery had been manufactured accidentally—or emotionally—by Vanessa herself.
Major payoff.
There had been no mysterious bracelet discovered in hospital linen.
Daniel stared at her.
“You told me a nurse gave it to you.”
I turned.
“What?”
Daniel’s face collapsed.
He had lied to me too.
Again.
“Why?”
He whispered, “Because I didn’t want you asking why Vanessa had been in my study.”
My stomach dropped.
“Why was that a problem?”
Daniel said nothing.
Vanessa looked at him.
And suddenly the baby-switch mystery gave way to an older betrayal.
May you like
Thomas whispered, “Claire, you should ask them when their relationship actually started.”
📖 The bracelet mystery was finally explained, but Daniel’s lie exposed a betrayal that began before our divorce—and Vanessa’s obsession with Lily suddenly had a personal origin. 👇
