Chapter 7 - THE SECRET IN THE REGISTRY
I drove to the state archives building in downtown Nashville under a dark, rain-swept sky.
The archives were housed in a cold, limestone building that closed to the public at 5:00 PM, but as a senior university researcher with active state health credentials, I had access to the secure digital medical registry—the database that held the official, historical birth certificates and maternal records for the state of Tennessee going back eighty years.
I sat in the basement terminal room, the only sound the steady drip of a leaky pipe in the corner.
My fingers shook as I typed in Brandon’s full name and date of birth: Brandon Thomas Vance. October 24th, 1991. Baptist Memorial Hospital, Nashville.
The screen whirred, the gray loading bar moving slowly across the monitor.
The digital file opened. It was a scanned copy of the original paper certificate, the ink faded to a dark brown, the signature of the attending physician a messy scribble.
Mother: Madeline Sterling Vance. Father: Thomas Edward Vance.
I scrolled down to the clinical attachment page—the page that held the newborn metabolic and blood typing records that were standard for all births in the state.
There it was.
Newborn Blood Type: AB-positive.
I stared at the numbers. Then, I pulled up Madeline’s medical profile from the state insurance database, which I was authorized to access for demographic research.
Madeline Sterling Vance. Blood Type: O-negative.
I stopped breathing.
The screen seemed to vibrate under my gaze.
Madeline was O-negative.
And Brandon was AB-positive.
Just as an AB-positive father cannot have an O-negative child... an O-negative mother cannot biologically give birth to an AB-positive child.
Brandon was not Madeline’s biological son.
The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow. The woman who had spent six years treating Luke like an outsider, the woman who had kicked the cake from his hands and claimed he didn't belong to the "rare, noble blood" of her family... was not even biologically related to her own son.
Madeline had adopted Brandon. Or worse.
I clicked through the medical records, searching for the maternity admission files for Baptist Memorial on October 24th, 1991.
There were no records.
Madeline had never been admitted to the hospital that week. There was no labor record, no epidural log, no discharge summary for a woman named Madeline Vance. The birth certificate had been filed three weeks after the birth date, signed by a private physician who had been the Sterling family’s personal doctor for forty years—a man who had died in a private plane crash in 1998.
Madeline had bought him. Or she had stolen him.
May you like
I grabbed my phone, my hands shaking so badly I dropped it onto the metal desk twice before I could dial Brandon’s number.
“Brandon,” I gasped when he answered, his voice tired from the hospital room. “Brandon, you need to leave Luke with the nurse and come to the archive room right now. We’ve been looking at the wrong side of the family tree.”
