Chapter 5 - The Woman Named Rose

I dropped the medical file onto the floor in a state of complete and utter shock.

I knelt down in front of the little girl who was quietly eating a sandwich on the examination table.

I gently asked Mia how old she was and where she had lived before finding the warehouse.

Mia softly replied that she was exactly seven years old and had always lived with her grandmother, Rose.

She explained that Rose had suddenly collapsed yesterday coughing up black blood before the ambulance took her away.

My mind raced frantically as I calculated the impossible timeline of my frozen genetic samples.

I asked Mia which public hospital her grandmother had been transported to.

Mia gave me the name of a rundown city hospital on the poorest side of the industrial district.

I grabbed my car keys and ordered Marcus to stay at the lab to guard Evelyn and my two children.

I drove like a madman through the flooded city streets to reach the hospital before the trail went completely cold.

I flashed my billionaire corporate credentials to bypass the exhausted nurses at the front desk.

I finally found Rose's designated room at the very end of a dark, flickering hallway.

I pushed the hospital door open and stopped dead in my tracks.

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Nine years after a car bomb killed his wife

The day I went to the hospital to discuss ending my pregnancy

Nearly two hundred people watched me stand alone

Rose was the exact same lead nurse who had drawn my blood at the fertility clinic twelve years ago.

And her heart monitor was currently flatlining while a tall man in a doctor's coat climbed out of her window.