Page 87 of The Missing Pages

ADA TRIED TO SOAK IN EVERY DETAIL OF HER DAUGHTER, every little sound she made, her every feature. The downy cap of copper hair, the eyelids like two little shells that shut out the world so peacefully, only to open and reveal such utterly perfect wonder.

“May I at least name her?” Ada asked after they peeled the infant from her arms.

“When you fill out the birth certificate,” Sister Mary informed her, “you can give her a name then. But those adopting her will rename her with an amended birth certificate after the adoption is processed.”

“Will she ever learn I’m her mother?” Ada’s voice broke.

Sister Mary shook her head. “It will be sealed away here, and she will never have access to our records.”

A small groan escaped from Ada’s lips.

“When you leave here you must try and forget this all happened. It is better that way, my child.”

Ada felt a swirl of rage sweep through her insides.

It festered in the hollow where her daughter had once been.

How could she ever forget any of this had ever happened?

And how could she ever forget this baby she loved so much?

It would be as impossible as asking her to live without a beating heart.

She was given a sepia-colored piece of paper with lines to add in her name and the father’s. One of the nuns had already filled in the date, time, and place of her daughter’s birth.

Ada filled out the easiest information first. She wrote in her own name.

When she came to the line asking her to name the father, she paused. Could she name Harry here? The nurse said the certificate would be sealed.

She could easily have written in Harry Elkins Widener and written “Deceased” beside it.

But the Widener name was famous in these parts.

She worried her daughter might be exploited in the future; that those seeking to adopt her wouldn’t be doing so out of love or the want of a child, but to line their own purse strings if they knew they could take a child connected to one of Philadelphia’s greatest fortunes.

But what if she wrote in a clue?

She scrawled in the name “Jim Hawkins.”

And for her daughter? That was easy. The red hair. The milky green eyes and gaze that seemed to pierce her heart. Harry had been here when she bought the Rossetti poems; so many of them were written for his muse Elizabeth Siddal, an artist in her own right.

Ada knew what she wanted to name their baby. She took the pen and wrote out the letters slowly and with great care: “Elizabeth Hawkins.”