Chapter 7: What Nathan Knew and When He Knew It
They moved Leah to a private room on the fourth floor.
Paula arranged it without being asked, signing the transfer paperwork herself and walking beside the bassinet the entire length of the corridor.
She did not explain why.
She simply did it, and Leah understood that there were people in this building who had watched Doreen operate for years and had been waiting for a reason to push back.
Gerald sat in the chair beside the window.
He had a legal pad on his knee and a pen that he kept clicking without seeming to notice.
Nathan stood near the door.
He had not spoken since the hallway.
He had followed the group to the private room the way a man follows a current — not swimming, not resisting, simply moving in the direction the water was going.
"I need to ask you some questions," Gerald said to Leah.
"Some of them will be uncomfortable.
You can stop at any time."
"Ask."
"How long have you been a patient of Dr.
Rusk's?"
"Since the beginning of the pregnancy.
Doreen recommended her."
"Did you ever discuss your mental health history with Dr.
Rusk?"
"I told her I'd had anxiety during the pregnancy.
That's all.
I've never been hospitalized for anything psychiatric.
I've never been medicated for anything psychiatric."
Gerald wrote.
"Did Dr.
Rusk ever ask you to sign any documents related to your mental health?"
"No."
"Did anyone ask you to sign anything during your admission to this hospital that you didn't fully read?"
Leah thought back to the admission desk.
The stack of forms.
The woman who had placed them in front of her one at a time and pointed to each signature line.
"There were standard admission forms," she said slowly.
"I signed them.
I didn't read every page."
Gerald looked up.
"Do you remember how many pages?"
"Seven.
Maybe eight."
"The standard admission packet for Briar Glen is five pages." He held her gaze.
"Someone added pages."
The room was very quiet.
Nathan moved away from the door.
He crossed to the window and stood with his back to the room, looking out at the parking structure below.
"Nathan," Leah said.
He didn't turn.
"Nathan.
Did you know what was in those forms?"
His shoulders rose and fell.
"Not all of it," he said.
"What did you know?"
He turned.
His face looked the way it had looked in the nursery at three in the morning — tired, and cornered, and unable to find the version of events that made him the person he wanted to be.
"She told me it was a precaution," he said.
"She said the forms would give her temporary authority if something happened during the delivery.
If you were incapacitated.
She said it was standard."
"A psychiatric hold is not standard," Gerald said.
"I know that now."
"Did you know it when you signed?"
A long pause.
"I didn't sign anything," Nathan said.
"She told me she'd taken care of it."
Leah looked at him.
She looked at him for a long time, the way you look at something you've been trying to see clearly for years and are finally seeing without the light adjusted in his favor.
"You didn't ask what *taking care of it* meant," she said.
"No."
"You didn't ask because you didn't want to know."
He didn't answer.
That was its own answer.
"I need to tell you something," Gerald said.
He was looking at his legal pad, not at either of them.
"The false psychiatric history on Dr.
Rusk's evaluation — the previous episodes that were listed.
Someone provided that information in writing.
It would have been submitted to Dr.
Rusk as part of a supplementary intake document, likely presented as coming from a prior provider."
"Doreen," Leah said.
"Almost certainly.
But I need documentation." He looked up.
"Is there anyone — a friend, a family member, a previous doctor — who can confirm that this history is fabricated?
Someone who has known you long enough to speak to your mental health?"
Leah thought of her sister in Portland.
Her college roommate.
Her own GP, who had been her doctor for nine years.
"Yes," she said.
"Several people."
"Good.
I'll need their contact information." Gerald stood.
"I'm going to speak with the hospital's legal office now.
The patient rights board has already frozen the hold.
What happens next depends on whether Dr.
Rusk cooperates with the review or attempts to defend the evaluation."
He moved toward the door.
"Mr.
Foss," Leah said.
He stopped.
"The family at Mercy General.
The one Doreen did this to before." She kept her voice level.
"What happened to their child?
Did they get full custody back?"
Gerald's hand rested on the door frame.
"Eventually," he said.
"It took fourteen months and two attorneys."
He left.
Owen made a sound in the bassinet — a small, definitive sound, the kind that meant he was hungry and had decided to make that fact known.
Leah lifted him.
He settled against her immediately, his fist curled against her collarbone.
Nathan watched from across the room.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Leah looked at her son's face.
"I know," she said.
"I know you are."
She did not say anything else.
There was nothing else to say yet.
The sorry was real.
She could hear that.
But real sorry and enough sorry were not the same thing, and she was not going to sort out the difference while she was still in a hospital bed with a two-day-old child and a frozen psychiatric hold and a mother-in-law in the hallway who had done this before and walked away clean.
Outside the door, she heard Doreen's voice — lower now, controlled, speaking to someone on a phone.
"Get me Richard Hale," Doreen said.
"Tell him it's urgent."
Richard Hale.
Leah didn't know the name.
May you like
But the way Doreen said it — the way the control came back into her voice the moment she said it — told Leah that the fight was not over.
It was changing shape.
