Chapter 5 - THE EMBRYO LEDGER
Ava Mercer did not want to meet us.
That was the first thing her attorney made clear.
She was twenty.
A sophomore at UConn.
Raised by two mothers.
One had carried her.
The other adopted her after birth.
Both women were furious.
Not confused.
Not curious.
Furious.
Their attorney, Celeste Morgan, spoke during a private call.
“Ava is not interested in joining a Blackwood family tree.”
“Understood,” Rebecca said.
“She does not want photographs.”
“Understood.”
“She does not want Mason contacting her.”
Mason answered himself.
“Understood.”
Celeste looked surprised.
“She may change her mind.”
“That will still be hers.”
Good.
The facts were different from Lily.
Ava’s mothers had intentionally used donor sperm.
They consented.
They selected a donor profile through Halcyon.
Brown eyes.
Six foot one.
Irish ancestry.
Musician.
No serious medical history.
The donor was not Mason.
At least that was what the paperwork said.
Genetic testing now strongly suggested Mason was her biological father.
Another wrong.
Different.
Lily’s parents believed Michael’s sperm had been used.
Ava’s mothers agreed to donor sperm but received genetic material from someone they had not selected.
Grace resulted from an unauthorized embryo transfer.
Three women.
Three different consent failures.
Same cryostorage account.
Same clinic.
Same doctor appearing around the records.
Adrian Cole.
The original criminal investigation had treated my case as extraordinary.
Charles Blackwood.
Vernon Hale.
Forged consent.
Family succession.
What if Charles had exploited a system already behaving badly?
What if Halcyon’s problem was bigger than him?
That possibility changed everything.
Federal investigators had closed much of the original Halcyon criminal case years earlier.
Some records remained under regulatory seal.
Rebecca contacted the attorneys who handled my civil settlement.
Within days, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office opened a preliminary review of new information.
Nobody declared conspiracy.
Good.
Facts.
Then the anonymous sender contacted Grace again.
Not by email.
A package.
Delivered to Camila’s office.
Inside:
A small black notebook.
No note.
No return address.
On the cover:
A.C.
Adrian Cole?
We did not open it casually.
Law enforcement collected fingerprints.
Documented chain of custody.
Scanned each page.
Then we received copies.
It was not a diary.
It was a ledger.
Dates.
Patient numbers.
Specimen codes.
Transfers.
Handwritten initials.
Some lines had dollar amounts.
Some had circles.
Some had the letter B.
We needed experts to interpret it.
The original Halcyon cryostorage codes appeared repeatedly.
Including Mason’s.
Six embryo codes.
Exactly the number Lily’s sheet listed.
Two with transfer dates we knew.
Grace.
Lily.
A third date matched Ava.
Three remaining.
One had notation:
NONVIABLE.
One:
RETURN — DESTROYED.
One:
HARTFORD? HOLD.
Question mark.
Even Dr. Cole apparently had doubts about his own records.
Grace stared.
“So maybe there are only three of us.”
Camila corrected gently.
“Maybe.”
Grace nodded.
She had learned to hate certainty without evidence as much as I did.
Then Rebecca found something worse.
Mason’s specimen code appeared on seventeen other lines.
Not embryos.
Sperm allocations.
Different patient numbers.
Different dates.
Some marked donor substitution.
My stomach turned.
“He used Mason as a donor?”
Rebecca said:
“We do not know what these annotations mean yet.”
Mason stood and walked away from the table.
Julia followed.
They returned ten minutes later.
His eyes were red.
“How many?”
“No answer yet.”
“Could there be seventeen?”
Rebecca did not lie.
“Possibly.”
Julia sat beside him.
Their marriage had survived Grace.
Counseling.
Lily.
Ava.
But seventeen possibilities?
Trauma did not require guilt to strain love.
I remembered that from the original Boston case.
Julia spoke quietly.
“Mason.”
He looked at her.
“Do not apologize to me.”
He closed his mouth.
“You didn’t do this.”
His eyes filled.
“I know.”
“No.”
She touched his face.
“You know intellectually.”
He almost laughed through tears.
“Therapy language.”
“Yes.”
She continued.
“We deal with what is real.”
That was my father’s sailing lesson in another form.
Read the water.
Find what changed.
Then move.
We hired an independent reproductive genetics team to decode the ledger with law enforcement.
The patient numbers were difficult because Halcyon had changed systems.
But three matched known cases.
Grace.
Lily.
Ava.
Four others potentially corresponded to living people.
Names remained confidential.
Nobody contacted them without legal and ethical process.
That mattered.
You did not announce to strangers that their parentage might be false because a notebook contained a code.
Investigators first authenticated the ledger.
Handwriting experts compared Adrian Cole’s known records.
Strong match.
Ink and paper dated consistently.
Then the question became:
Who sent it?
Adrian Cole had been living in Lisbon for six years.
Supposedly retired.
He denied sending anything.
His attorney issued a statement.
DR. COLE NEVER KNOWINGLY PARTICIPATED IN NONCONSENSUAL REPRODUCTIVE PROCEDURES AND WILL COOPERATE WITH LAWFUL AUTHORITIES.
Familiar.
Careful.
Then journalists found him.
He refused interviews.
Lydia March refused comment.
Charles was dead.
Vernon Hale had died in prison four years earlier.
The people who knew the most were disappearing.
Grace hated that.
“Dead men keep leaving everyone else to clean up.”
“Yes.”
“What happens if Cole dies?”
“Then records matter more.”
“What if Lydia knows?”
“She probably knows something.”
“Can’t we make her talk?”
“No.”
“I hate law.”
“Good. You’re considering law school.”
She glared at me.
I smiled.
Then another part of the ledger emerged.
Payments.
Several six-figure transfers from entities abbreviated BBLF.
Blackwood Biomedical Legacy Fund.
The same foundation Lydia once ran.
Dates overlapped with unauthorized specimen activity.
Lydia’s attorneys responded immediately.
The foundation funded fertility research.
Halcyon received legitimate grants.
No proof money paid for misconduct.
Maybe true.
But then Daniel asked the question none of us had.
“What exactly did the foundation fund?”
We looked at him.
He shrugged.
“I’m an architect. We read scopes of work because otherwise buildings become lawsuits.”
Rebecca requested old grant agreements through discovery related to the trust dispute.
The foundation resisted.
Court hearing.
Arguments.
Confidential donor information.
Research privilege.
Eventually, the judge ordered narrow production.
The grant title:
CONTINUITY IN HERITABLE MALE-LINE FERTILITY PRESERVATION.
My stomach turned.
Not illegal.
Not automatically sinister.
Research into fertility preservation existed legitimately.
But Charles’s obsession with male-line descendants was now written into philanthropy.
Another grant:
LONG-TERM GAMETE UTILIZATION AFTER ONCOLOGIC PRESERVATION.
Mason had banked sperm before cancer treatment.
Another:
POST-THAW VIABILITY IN LIMITED SPECIMEN ENVIRONMENTS.
The language did not prove abuse.
It showed Charles funded research adjacent to exactly the materials later misused.
Then came an internal foundation memo.
Prepared by Lydia March.
Purpose:
Ensure continuity of Blackwood-funded reproductive research and establish practical pathways for preservation assets where patients become unavailable, incapacitated, or nonresponsive.
Rebecca read the last word twice.
“Nonresponsive.”
I felt cold.
In Boston, my chart falsely claimed I became nonresponsive.
Grace saw my face.
“Mom?”
“I’m okay.”
Daniel put his hand near mine.
Not on it.
Waiting.
I took it.
Camila continued reading.
The memo argued clinics should have broad emergency authority over stored reproductive material.
That was controversial even then.
But one handwritten note in the margin mattered more.
Charles’s handwriting.
L.M. — FIND A WAY AROUND CONSENT DELAYS.
The room became silent.
Lydia March had seen that note.
Her initials.
Maybe she rejected it.
Maybe she ignored it.
Maybe she helped.
We did not know.
Then law enforcement received a second anonymous package.
This one contained an old portable hard drive.
Encrypted.
No password.
A label:
HALCYON — COLD STORAGE.
Cyber forensic teams began work.
Three days later, Grace, Lily, and Ava each received identical certified letters.
From the Blackwood Descendant Trust.
The trustees were requiring formal DNA verification within sixty days to preserve potential beneficiary status.
Ava’s attorney responded:
No.
Lily hesitated.
Nine hundred million dollars can make hesitation understandable.
Grace laughed when she read hers.
Not because it was funny.
Because absurdity sometimes becomes the only available emotion.
“So Charles violates consent to create children, then his trust demands our DNA if we want the money.”
“Yes.”
She looked at Camila.
“Can they do that?”
“Possibly.”
“I’m not doing it.”
“Okay.”
“But if I don’t, does Lydia get more control?”
“Potentially.”
Grace stood.
“Then I want to challenge the trust.”
Everyone looked at her.
Camila remained calm.
“On what basis?”
Grace’s hands shook.
“That it is built around the products of illegal conduct.”
“Legally complicated.”
“I know.”
“That could become public.”
“I know.”
“You may have to testify.”
“I know.”
“Your medical history may be discussed.”
Grace stopped.
There.
Cost.
Choice mattered only when consequences were visible.
She looked at me.
I did not tell her what to do.
She hated me for approximately four seconds.
Then exhaled.
“I still want to challenge it.”
Camila nodded.
“Then we build the strongest case we can.”
Grace sat.
Lily watched her.
Then said:
“I might join.”
Ava did not.
That was okay.
Different people could respond differently to the same violation.
That was the whole point.
A week later, the encrypted Halcyon drive finally opened.
The first folder contained ordinary clinic files.
The second contained research grants.
The third was password-protected again.
Name:
SUCCESSION.
Inside were scanned emails.
Charles.
Adrian Cole.
Lydia March.
And a spreadsheet.
Thirty-two rows.
Patient numbers.
Embryo identifiers.
Outcomes.
Beside three rows:
LIVE BIRTH CONFIRMED.
Grace.
Lily.
Ava.
Beside another:
PREGNANCY — OUTCOME UNKNOWN.
The final two columns contained something worse.
TRUST ELIGIBLE?
And:
NOTIFY L.M.
Grace stared.
“This was about the trust.”
Rebecca shook her head.
“Maybe partially.”
“L.M. is Lydia.”
“Likely.”
Grace looked at me.
I had no comforting answer.
Then Daniel pointed toward the fourth live-transfer record.
“Who is patient H-8821?”
Nobody knew.
The pregnancy outcome was unknown.
But if a child had been born, that person would now be approximately eighteen.
Another possible Blackwood descendant.
May you like
Another person who might have no idea.
And according to the spreadsheet, Lydia March had been notified nineteen years ago.
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