Free Birthright by Nora Roberts Page A

through papers not her own. It was only to put all this to rest. She scanned through, trying to pick up key data without actually reading what she considered her mother’s private business.
    She found the reports and treatment for the first miscarriage in August of 1969. She’d known about it, and about the one that followed in the fall of ’seventy-one.
    Her mother had told her how they’d devastated her, had even sent her into a clinical depression. And how much finally having a healthy baby girl had meant to her.
    And here, Callie noted with a shudder of relief, here was the third pregnancy. The ob-gyn had been concerned, naturally, with the diagnosis of incompetent cervical os that had caused the previous miscarriages, had prescribed medication, bed rest through the first trimester.
    The pregnancy had been carefully monitored by Dr. Henry Simpson. She’d even been admitted to the hospital for two days during her seventh month due to concerns about hypertension, and dehydration due to continued morning sickness.
    But she’d been treated, released.
    And that, to Callie’s confusion, was where alldocumentation of the pregnancy ended. The next of the paperwork picked up nearly a year later with a sprained ankle.
    She began to flip through more quickly, certain she’d find the rest of the documents mixed in.
    But they weren’t there. Nothing was there. It was as if her mother’s pregnancy had stopped in its seventh month.
    There was a knotted ball in her stomach as she rose again, returned to the files. She opened the next drawer, thumbed through looking for more medicals. And when she found no folder that fit, crouched and started to open the bottom drawer.
    Found it locked.
    For a moment, she stayed just as she was, squatted in front of the polished wooden cabinet, one hand on the gleaming brass handle. Then she straightened and, refusing to allow herself to think, searched through her father’s desk for the key.
    When she didn’t find it, she took his letter opener, knelt down in front of the drawer and broke the lock.
    Inside she found a long metal fire box, again locked. This she took back to the desk, sat. For a long moment she simply stared at it, wishing it away.
    She could put it back, stick it in the drawer and pretend it didn’t exist. Whatever was inside was something her father had gone to some trouble to keep private.
    What right did she have to violate his privacy?
    And yet wasn’t that what she did every day? She violated the privacy of the dead, of strangers, because knowledge and discovery were more sacred than their secrets.
    How could she dig up, test, examine, handle the bones of dead strangers and not open a box that might very well hold secrets that involved her own life?
    “I’m sorry,” she said aloud, and attacked the lock with the letter opener.
    She lifted the lid, and began.
    There hadn’t been a third miscarriage. Nor had there been a live birth. Callie forced herself to read as though it were a lab report from a dig. In the first week of the eighth month of her pregnancy, Vivian Dunbrook’s fetus had diedin the womb. Labor was induced, and she delivered a stillborn daughter on June 29, 1974.
    Diagnosis: pregnancy-induced hypertension, resulting in missed pregnancy.
    The cervical defect that induced the miscarriages, the extreme hypertension resulting in the stillbirth made another pregnancy dangerous.
    Less than two weeks later, a hysterectomy, recommended due to cervical damage, made it impossible.
    The patient was treated for depression.
    On December 16, 1974, they adopted an infant girl whom they named Callie Ann. A private adoption, Callie noted dully, arranged through a lawyer. The fee for his services was ten thousand dollars. In addition, another fee of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars was paid through him to the unnamed biological mother.
    The infant, somehow it helped to think of it as the infant, was examined by Dr. Peter O’Malley, a Boston pediatrician, and