“Russian?”
Kelsey nodded. “I don’t think it’s her language because she doesn’t really respond, but it probably sounds a lot more familiar to her than English.”
He dropped onto a bench seat. “I was afraid she was going to die. How did you know to do that?”
“I didn’t know, not for sure.” She eased to the seat beside him. Janie’s eyes were drifting shut, but her color was good. Crisis averted, for now. “But kids in underdeveloped countries don’t have the kind of medical care we have here, so I’ve seen this before. I think it’s a heart defect.”
“Oh, right—missionary kid. Where was this?” He watched Janie’s chest rise and fall, not quite ready to assume she was going to be okay.
“Rwanda. There was a little kid there who would be running and playing and then all of a sudden his lips and hands would turn blue and he would gasp for air, just like this. His fix was to stop and squat down and lean forward. It’s a crude treatment, but it works—for a while.” She stood with the baby in her arms. “I think instead of going straight to the pediatrician, I’ll have the pediatrician call Children’s Hospital. She needs to be seen by a specialist.”
He grabbed the diaper bag and sippy cup from the deck and followed her toward her car. “Do you want me to go?”
“We’ll be fine. I’ll keep you posted when I can.”
Seven hours later, Kelsey pulled up at the drive through at Chick-fil-A. She briefly felt guilty about her choice, but just as quickly discarded the thought. She was starving. And she was traumatized.
Janie had been poked, prodded, stuck, ultrasounded, echoed and basically put through every test any of the pediatric cardiologists could think of at the children’s clinic. And every test came back with the same result. She was one sick little baby. The miracle, they said, was that she had lived—and basically thrived—this long. She was small for her age because of the lack of oxygen and nutrients getting to her cells.
And she would have to have surgery as soon as the doctors could arrange it. Normally kids with her condition would’ve had surgery before they were a year old.
The thought that this little baby might’ve died because no one had gotten her the medical treatment she needed … Kelsey took a deep, cleansing breath and tried not to focus on how angry it made her.
The perky teenager handed Kelsey a bag of yummy chicken and fries and not one but two milk shakes. She figured if she was going to go bug Ethan, she should at least take a food offering.
She hadn’t really stopped to think why she was going to him. Maybe it was because he had found Janie, and she thought maybe he would have an emotional connection. Maybe it was because she saw how tender he was with the baby. Or how worried he’d been when she had had the episode earlier this morning.
He was someone she admired, someone she was working with. That was all. Maybe it was the fact that, like her, he’d endured more than anyone should have to. The fact that his beautiful blue eyes connected with hers in a way that she’d rarely felt before … well, that was just something she would have to deal with.
He needed to find his son. She needed to find out the identity of the baby currently sleeping in the backseat of her car.
They could help each other.
She passed the turn to her house and kept going to the marina. When she pulled into a parking place, she called his phone. When he answered, his deep voice, raspy from lack of use, rumbled in her ear.
“Hi, I’m in the parking lot. I have news.”
“Be right there.”
In two minutes, he came walking down the pier, a computer under his arm, his long, jean-clad legs eating up the distance. He slid into the passenger seat, glanced in the backseat at the sleeping baby and then back at her, those blue eyes full of concern. “Is she okay?”
“She will be.” Kelsey handed him a milk shake. He looked at it like it was a bomb. “It’s chocolate. Drink it.”
He took a sip. “What did the doctor say?”
“Doctors, plural. We just got done. She has to have surgery. Maybe more than one. Tetralogy of Fallot is the genetic defect that causes her to turn blue, but she also has another defect that has to be repaired. It turns out it’s pretty rare.”
“Wherever you have to go, we can take her.”
Here he was, his son missing after two years of being presumed dead, and he was offering to take her wherever she needed to go, whatever she needed to do to take care of Janie.
It was enough to melt the strongest woman’s defenses, and she was a sucker for a soft-hearted man.
Kelsey took a long sip of her milk shake and cleared her throat. “There is some good news, though. The pediatric cardiologist at Children’s emailed the records for Janie to the specialist in Boston and got him on the phone. It seems that this doctor has been emailed her records before.”
Ethan jolted. “So we can identify her?”
“Maybe.” This was the frustrating part, the part that had her banging her head on a wall for most of the afternoon. Well, more than the constant waiting with a fussy baby. “The doctor wouldn’t release the records he had. In fact, he wouldn’t reveal any information about her at all, not even the doctor who originally emailed the records.”
“We need to get a court order. That’s the closest thing to a lead I’ve seen. I have someone I can call—”
She shook her head, smiled. “I’m already on it. There’s a federal judge here who knows a judge in the Boston area he can tap for a warrant. I called him this afternoon when it became clear that Boston was going to be difficult.”
Ethan turned to her, and there was the smile, just that little tug, at the corner of his mouth. “Oh, you are good.”
“It isn’t my first time around this particular block with doctors and records on foster children. I go straight for the big guns. So what did you find out?”
In answer, he opened his computer and clicked through to the photo gallery. At least a hundred, maybe two hundred photos of infant faces popped up.
She sucked in a breath. “All those are …?”
Ethan shrugged. “Without any more information, I can only assume that they are babies who were trafficked here for profit. Adoption scam is what I’d guess. There’s a lot of money to be made if the person is ruthless enough.” He clicked on one about halfway down. “Here’s Janie.”
“She would’ve been an adoption risk because of her birth defect. If anyone made a stink, they would put the whole operation in jeopardy.”
“Exactly. This one—” he scrolled up a little bit and his cursor hovered over another picture “—is my son. It looks like it was taken about two weeks to a month after he supposedly died. I think this is proof that he was abducted.”
“That’s absolutely incredible.”
He nodded. “I don’t know what Amy was doing at the restaurant that night, but at least now I can figure that it had something to do with these babies being trafficked and Charlie being kidnapped.”
Kelsey reached for his hand. “I’m so sorry, Ethan.”
His gaze tracked to meet hers. And held.
“I know.” He took a long, slow breath and opened the door. “Do you want me to follow you home?”
How could he be worried about them when he was the one who’d just heard life-altering news? News that turned the belief he’d had for the last two years on its head. It had to be killing him that his son could be alive, yet he didn’t know where he was.
She