The Ripple Effect Read Online Free

around the desk to plant a kiss on her cheek.
    “Get out of here, you young trouble maker. You haven’t changed a bit.”
    “Neither have you.”
    Olive gripped his arm as he turned to leave. “Shay, I’m serious about this. Be very careful how you go about finding her. She may not thank you for turning her life upside down. You know nothing about her and you could cause a lot of pain to her family if you go charging in just because it suits you and you want to find her. You can’t afford to be selfish. There are proper channels to deal with this sort of thing. I don’t know why I let you con me into it—you with your big brown eyes.”
    Shay laughed. “I promise I’ll be careful. I’m a doctor remember. I took an oath to help people.”
    “Take care of yourself,” she said. “None of us wants you hurt through this.” She stood up.
    “I know. I appreciate that but until I at least know where she is and what her name is I won’t feel complete.”
    “I understand,” said Olive. She hugged him against her bony frame. “I’ve often wondered about her myself. Helping her into the world that way and then passing her on to strangers at that hospital. It was very hard, very hard.”
    Shay frowned. “Who took her to Sydney? Was it you?”
    Olive nodded. “Yes, I took her.” She pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped her eyes quickly. “And I’ll tell you something else I don’t think you know. Jenny and I named her. We shouldn’t have because we knew we couldn’t keep her and her new parents would give her a name but we couldn’t just call her baby.”
    “What did you name her?”
    “Claire.”
    The Madeleine Wright Hospital hadn’t the funding or staff with the time to update all its old records to a computer database. The information on the pre-1985 births, admissions, and adoptions were filed in a basement archive. An overstretched staff member, accepting his credentials as a doctor, left him to walk the rows of grey steel cabinets searching for that momentous year. Shay breathed in two deep lungfuls of cool air. Concrete and neglect.
    Amazing and overwhelming to think that in one of those blank cabinets lay the answer to his questions, the end of his search. So easily. He ran his fingers over the drawer marked Jan/Feb 1981 and pulled. It slid open smoothly and there under G was her file. There was no indication the adoptive parents wanted to remain anonymous or wished not to be contacted. He wasn’t breaking any confidentiality after all. That was a relief.
    Baby Grayson, female. Born February 10, 1981. Birrigai, NSW. Mother Emily Rebecca Grayson, dec. Father unknown. Delivered by Dr Jennifer Cross.
    Admitted on February 16th, 1981. Accompanying nurse Sister Olive Newsome, Birrigai Medical Centre.
    Shay scanned the baby’s medical summation. She was healthy, a reasonable weight considering her mother’s youth and condition. No allergies detected. Feeding well. Etc.
    He flipped the page. Cleared for release a fortnight later by an illegible signature. Release from hospital signed by Child Services Officer Mary Wilson and adoptive parents William and Natalie Paice of an address in Sunshine Point.
    Paice. Claire Paice. No, not Claire. They would have given her another name.
    She’d grown up in Sunshine Point, by the sea. Just an hour and a half south of Sydney in a small coastal community now almost absorbed into Sydney’s greater sprawl. People commuted daily to work in the city. Did William Paice?
    That evening Shay sat in his narrow terrace house in the inner Sydney suburb of Glebe, nursing a glass of Shiraz and staring at nothing. The phone book lay open on the coffee table. They were still there, the Paice’s. They hadn’t moved in all those years. Tomorrow he could quite possibly meet her. His sister. His real flesh and blood sister. Crunch-time.
    What did she look like? Him? Or their mother? He must take after his father because Emily’s eyes had been grey not brown and Dad said she