Chapter 3 - The Sealed File-3
By ten o'clock that evening, the house was completely still. Lily was fast asleep in her room, her hand tucked beneath her pillow. Daniel was downstairs in the kitchen making tea, while I sat at the built-in mahogany desk in my home office, the screen of my laptop illuminating the dark room.
My father’s reaction on the porch had confirmed my worst suspicion.
When I had mentioned him looking at Lily’s adoption file, it had been a calculated bluff—a shot in the dark based on a hunch. But the sheer terror that had flashed across Arthur Sterling’s face proved I had hit a nerve. He hadn't just disliked Lily because she was adopted. He was afraid of her.
I opened an encrypted browser window and dialed Marcus Reed’s private cell line. He answered on the second ring.
"Emily?" Marcus said, the background noise of shuffling papers audible over the line. "Are you alright? Daniel texted me about the scene on your porch."
"I'm fine, Marcus," I said, leaning back against the leather chair, wincing slightly as my abdominal stitches pulled. "I need a favor. A big one. And it needs to be completely off the record."
Marcus paused. "What kind of favor?"
"Two years ago, when we adopted Lily from the Oregon Department of Human Services, the biological mother's identity was sealed under a Class-A privacy order," I explained, scrolling through my local copy of Lily's adoption decree. "The official record said she was abandoned at a safe-surrender site in Eugene when she was three days old. No name, no medical history, no relative tracking."
"That's standard for safe-surrender cases, Emily," Marcus noted. "Unless there's evidence of a crime or a medical emergency, the state protects the mother's identity permanently."
"My father was on the DHS advisory board from 2018 to 2023," I said. "He had administrative clearance to bypass standard archive locks. I need you to find out if he accessed Lily’s sealed file before our adoption went through."
There was a long silence on the line. I could hear Marcus breathing slowly as he processed the implications of my request.
"Emily," Marcus said carefully, his tone shifting into professional caution. "Bypassing state adoption seals without a court order is a serious violation. If your father did that, he committed a state offense. If I use my contacts to pull those audit logs..."
"Marcus," I interrupted quietly. "He told my six-year-old daughter that she was going back to an orphanage. He tried to break her spirit while I was lying in a hospital bed after surgery. I don't care about state offenses anymore. I want to know what my family is hiding."
Marcus let out a long, weary sigh. "Give me two hours. The former chief archivist at DHS owes me a massive favor from a probate case four years ago. If there’s a digital footprint of Arthur accessing those files, I’ll find it."
"Thank you," I said, and hung up.
I sat in the quiet office, staring at the digital photograph of Lily that sat in a silver frame on my desk. It was taken last summer at the Oregon coast. She was wearing a yellow raincoat, laughing as a small wave washed over her rainboots, her eyes bright and filled with pure, innocent joy.
I reached out and touched the glass frame. Who are you, Lily? I thought. And why are they so afraid of you?
My thoughts were interrupted by the quiet click of the office door opening. Daniel walked in, carrying two steaming mugs of peppermint tea. He set one down on the coaster beside my laptop and pulled up a chair next to mine.
"She didn't wake up once," Daniel said softly, taking a sip from his mug. "Sarah left an hour ago. She told me to tell you that if your parents try to come near the house again, she'll call the press herself."
"Sarah’s a good sister," I smiled faintly, taking a sip of the warm tea. "I wish I could say the same for mine."
"Madison called my phone ten minutes ago from a burner number," Daniel added, his jaw tightening. "She wasn't yelling this time. She sounded... scared, Em. She asked if you were really going to pull the backing on her agency’s lease."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her she should have thought about her lease before she told a six-year-old child she was disposable," Daniel said flatly. "I hung up on her."
I looked at my husband, feeling a surge of profound gratitude. Through all the chaos of the last forty-eight hours—the emergency surgery, the family betrayal, the legal war—Daniel had stood like an unyielding wall between our home and the wolves outside.
At 12:45 AM, my laptop chimed with an incoming encrypted email from Marcus. The subject line read simply: DHS Audit Log - CONFIDENTIAL.
My hands trembled slightly as I clicked the file open. Attached was a high-resolution PDF scan of an administrative search query from the Oregon DHS central registry, dated November 14, 2022—three weeks before our adoption of Lily was finalized.
The user ID associated with the search query belonged to Arthur M. Sterling.
He had not only accessed Lily’s sealed adoption file; he had downloaded the unredacted biological intake report, the original hospital birth records, and the sealed DNA marker profile of her biological mother.
I scrolled down to the bottom of the PDF, where the original, unredacted birth certificate from Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene was attached.
Child's Name: Lily Unknown
Date of Birth: October 14, 2018
Mother's Name: Julianna Margaret Sterling
The mug of tea slipped from my hand, crashing onto the hardwood floor and shattering into a dozen sharp porcelain pieces, hot liquid splashing across my ankles.
May you like
I didn't feel the burn. I couldn't breathe.
Julianna Sterling was my younger sister—the sister who had supposedly died in a car accident in the mountains of Colorado eight years ago when she was twenty-one years old.
