And that’s when I remembered.
Vanessa.
Grant’s “old colleague” Vanessa, who’d come up in conversation three or four times over the past year, whose name he said a little too carefully.
I’d assumed, in the ugly ordinary way, that Vanessa was an affair.
I had never once imagined she was a broker.
Ruth made some calls over the next two days — quiet ones, the kind a former state official can make.
What she assembled turned my grief inside out.
Meadowbrook Placement Services was under investigation in two states.
Not for standard adoptions.
For arranging private, off-the-books “placements” of infants — for cash — using falsified paperwork.
Babies who were signed away by one desperate parent, sometimes without the other parent’s knowledge or consent, and delivered to families who paid enormous sums and were told the arrangements were legal.
And Grant, drowning in debt, had signed a document at the hospital.
