Chapter 4

Stef's POV

I glance at my watch for the hundredth time since the nurse left us here. It's only been a little over thirty minutes but I'm growing impatient… Lux keeps popping her bright yellow gum in her mouth, which I am almost positive that she's only doing to purposely annoy me. But to be honest, the nurse's reaction worries me even more. Why did she look so startled? That was never a good thing in my line of work.

"You shouldn't have let her go," Lux finally breaks the silence. "She's not coming back for at least another hour," Lux complains.

I look up and see her glaring at me, as if all of this was my fault. After we have a silent staring-match with each other, she eventually gives up and starts to walk away from me.

"Where are you going?" I ask abruptly.

She doesn't even bother turning around to answer, but stops in front of a water dispenser, grabs a small cup and starts filling it.

I relax a little and look down at my watch again. That's when I have to stand up. "This is ridiculous," I mumble beforeI make my way over to the help desk again, "Excuse me. Hi. I've been waiting to speak with the nurse for a while and I have to get back to work soon."

"Ma'am, you're at a hospital…"

"I know that, but I'm not a patient," I remind her.

"Nurse Silver will be with you as soon as she can."

I couldn't believe how frustrated I was getting with this woman. I knew I wouldn't have if the nurse hadn't acted so… guilty. Why did she get so agitated at the mention of Dr. Greene's name?

"Mrs. Foster?" Nurse Silver comes out of a small room, and judging by the look on her face, I'm not sure that she has any good news for me.

"Yes?" I answer immediately. Normally, I would correct her and let her know that it was Adams Foster now, but I wasn't in the mood for any of that.

"Sorry about the wait. Can you ladies follow me into my office, please?"

"You have an office?" Lux retorts from behind me.

"Yes… I'm the head nurse."

As soon as she closes the door behind us, she tells us to take a seat. "Alright, I'm Nurse Silver, and I'm sorry about my secretary. She's new and our files aren't exactly organized…"

"That's okay," I respond. The last thing either Lux or I wanted to hear was the nurse stalling.

"Well, this isn't going to be easy to hear, but…you two need to hear it…Dr. Greene, your primary doctor fourteen years ago, was fired about 10 years ago for doing something very similar to this actually..." The nurse takes a breath and examines my face, which surely has confusion written all over it.

"What do you mean 'something like this'?" I ask with concern.

Nurse Silver looks over to Lux before she continues, "We discovered that he had forged signatures onto birth certificates before…"

"So, Stefanie's not my birth mom?" The tone in Lux's voice shows her confusion.

I glance down and try to keep my mind focused, even though my heart goes out to the girl. None of this would've happened if it weren't for that doctor mixing up the paperwork.

"No, I didn't say that," the nurse corrects. "He may have forged the signatures, but we found two birth certificates in the system with your name. Both certificates were written by Dr. Greene, but one had Stefanie and Mike's signature, while another had Jacqueline and Thomas Jenkins' signature. Other than that, everything else on them was identical." She placed the two forms in front of us to look at.

"Why would she have two different birth certificates?" I ask.

"Mrs. Foster, can I ask you a personal question? It's okay if you don't want to answer, but it could help us determine exactly what happened."

I nod after I look over at Lux, who is staring at me as well. Regardless of the fact that I feel completely uncomfortable with where I think this is heading, I would rather get to the bottom of this sooner rather than later. "Go ahead," I urge her.

"Okay… did you ever hold your baby when she was born?"

I stare at the woman for a while; wanting nothing more than to run out of the hospital and never come back. I try to keep my body as stiff as possible. "No…Um…I didn't want to. But I saw that she wasn't moving. My husband saw her too. And the doctor told me that she died during childbirth… I asked him to get her out of the room once I found out… I thought that holding her would've been too…" I wipe away the tear that was daring to fall from the corner of my eye and change the subject, "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Well, we think that you're little girl wasn't a stillborn. We believe that she was born sleeping… It rarely happens, but that's the most logical explanation for all of this, considering the circumstances of Dr. Greene's past… When a child is born sleeping, there is no noise and the baby can be, well… mistaken for stillborn. Of course, there are test that the doctors have to do, to make that call. Dr. Greene is the doctor with the most number of stillbirths, which is why he was fired. Something didn't add up... It turns out that years ago, Dr. Greene had illegally handed another woman's baby, that was recorded as stillborn, to a less fortunate couple, a couple that didn't have any kids.…"

The nurse handed a piece of paper over to me, "Here is your baby's fetal death certificate. It shows here that the baby's weight is 7lbs 4oz, but it also has another weight on the birth certificate in your name, which is 6lbs 2 oz. You can see that Dr. Greene signed off on both documents" she hands another piece of paper to me, "But we also have on file the weight for the Jenkins' baby, which was 6lbs and 2oz."

"I don't get it," Lux interjects.

"Well…Basically… another woman, Jacqueline Jenkins had a baby on that same day. At first she was recorded as 7lbs and 4oz, but when they rechecked the weight on the very same day, the baby was 6lbs and 2oz. Which alone doesn't make any sense and Dr. Greene should have caught it immediately… Which leads us to believe that Dr. Greene had done the same thing with you that he had done with the baby ten years ago."

"So, what are you saying? …That my baby wasn't a stillborn and that this… this…Dr. Greene intentionally handed my daughter to another couple?" I ask angrily.

"Mrs. Foster, we aren't a hundred percent sure if that's what happened, but that's what we believe happened…Dr. Greene was a very smart man, but he admitted to doing this before and even went to prison because of it. Because he didn't believe what he did was wrong."

"Is he still in jail?" Lux asks, and I can't help but wonder how she was being so nonchalant about all of this. She was behaving as if nothing the woman had said affected her at all.

"No. He was very old and he died shortly after he was sentenced." The nurse looks back over at me, but I'm still trying to wrap my mind around everything that was just said to respond to her.

How could I have missed this?

"Ma'am, the only way we can be sure about all of this is if we do a Maternity DNA test. It's the best way to find out if this is actually what happened. The hospital will pay for it, since we do believe that we are at fault for all of this."

A DNA test? Is this really happening?

"Okay then. That's great. Let's do the test," Lux stares at me blankly, and then back at the nurse. "How long will it take? Like a couple of minutes or something?"

"Um, no. This isn't like a pregnancy test. A DNA test takes much longer," Nurse Silver answers.

"How much longer?" Lux asks nervously.

"We should get the results within three days."

"Three days?! No! But my hearing is the day after tomorrow. There's got to be some way we can put a rush on this or something."

"I'm sorry but we really can't. We have to send it to the lab and it's not an easy process."

"Well I can't wait three days," Lux says matter-of-factly and crosses her arms and looks over to me.

I stare at her for a moment, as I try to take in her facial features. She squints her eyes at me as if I have gone mad. I glance back at the nurse, "How soon can we get this DNA test started?"

"Right away," Nurse Silver confirms.

A/N: Okay, so I got some of the ideas for this fic from myself. I was actually born sleeping, lol. (So it DOES happen.) My mom said the doctor had to pinch me to make sure that I was okay since I obviously wasn't crying. Of course the pinch woke me up and I started crying like crazy and that was when my mom relaxed. I wasn't mistaken for stillborn or switched at birth or anything, but it's just a weirdly true story.