I was not present when the original report was changed. I learned of the alteration afterward, when a copy of the original notes was brought to me. I have kept that copy because I feared the consequences of destroying it.
I have reason to believe the person responsible was a member of your family.
Samuel’s fingers tightened around the page.
He looked at Thomas.
His brother had become very still.
“Keep reading,” Anna whispered.
Samuel continued.
The report did not establish that you were permanently incapable of fathering a child. It stated that further examination would be required. No such examination was ever performed.
I cannot tell you whether you are fertile now. No honest physician can make that determination without examining you. But the certainty with which you have lived was never justified by the medical evidence.
I have enclosed the original treatment notes and the correspondence that led me to this conclusion. I should have come to you years ago.
I am sorry.
Benjamin Harris, M.D.
The room seemed to contract around Samuel.
He read the final sentence once more.
Then he placed the letter on the table.
For fourteen years, he had believed that he could never have children.
The truth was worse than he had imagined.
Someone had taken uncertainty and turned it into a life sentence.
Someone had allowed him to grieve for a future that had never been medically ruled out.
Someone had watched him withdraw from the world, build walls around his heart, and tell an unknown woman in a marriage advertisement that he could never give her a child.
Samuel lifted his eyes.
“Who did it?”
Thomas shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
Samuel looked at him for several seconds.
Then he unfolded the smaller document.
It was a bank draft.
The date was two days after Samuel’s accident. The amount was five hundred dollars, a considerable sum in 1872. The recipient was Dr. Edward Lang, the physician who had treated Samuel at the territorial hospital.
The person who had purchased the draft was listed in the lower corner.
Thomas Whitaker.
Anna made a small sound behind Samuel.
Thomas rose so abruptly that his chair scraped backward across the floor.
“That proves nothing.”
Samuel stared at the signature.
It was his brother’s handwriting.
The same slanted letters. The same heavy pressure on the final stroke. The same distinctive way Thomas crossed the letter T.
“You paid him.”
“I did not.”
“Your name is on the draft.”
“Anyone could have written my name.”
“Then why did you come here tonight?”