Three Girls, One Stolen Life

Chapter 3 - The Letter

Daniel did not take the children straight to the hospital without warning. Nora called Elena first.

He heard only Nora's side of the conversation.

“Yes. Him.”

A pause.

“All three.”

Then Nora held out the phone.

Daniel could hear breathing.

“Elena?”

“Is she really with you?”

“Sophie. She's here.”

A small sound came through the speaker. Not a word. Something broken loose after being held too long.

“Can we come?” he asked.

“Yes.”

At the hospital, Lucy ran to the bed. Rose followed more slowly, protecting her scraped knee. Sophie stayed at the doorway, looking at the woman whose face she knew only from an old wedding photograph.

Elena sat upright against the pillows.

Her eyes moved from one child to the next. She pressed a hand to her mouth.

“Hello, Sophie.”

“You know my name?”

“I never forgot it.”

Nora took the girls to choose drinks from the corridor machine. Daniel remained beside the door until Elena pointed to a chair.

“I was told you didn't want us,” she said.

“I was told you left.”

She closed her eyes.

After the delivery, Elena had woken in a different room. Two babies slept beside her. The third, she was told, had been transferred for specialist care.

Then Daniel's mother arrived.

Vivienne Ashford had shown Elena papers bearing Daniel's signature. She said he was seeking sole custody of the transferred child. She said the marriage was over. Elena, weak and frightened, had demanded to speak to him.

Her phone had vanished with her belongings during the transfer.

“Your mother brought me another one,” Elena said. “A new number. She said you had blocked my old one.”

When Elena was discharged, a driver took her and the twins to a rented flat. Daniel was supposedly abroad. His office refused her calls. Letters came back through a solicitor who said all contact must go through him.

“I should have found another way,” she whispered.

Daniel shook his head, but she went on.

“I tried to go to the house. Your mother met me at the gate. She said if I made a scene, I would lose Lucy and Rose too.”

He remembered a different story about that day: Elena had come for money, his mother said, and refused to see him.

Elena had eventually left the city. For years she worked wherever she could bring the children. Recently, illness had cost her a cleaning job and the room attached to it. Nora had found them temporary shelter above the bakery.

“I wasn't dead,” she said. “I wasn't gone. I was just somewhere you weren't looking.”

Daniel lowered his head.

“I stopped looking because I believed her.”

It was the first thing he said that Elena did not have to question.