For seven years, I lived with the guilt of having ended my baby’s life with my own defective genes. Then, the hospital called with security footage that shattered everything I had been forced to believe. And the face on that screen belonged to the one person I never, ever suspected.
My name is Bethany Hartwell. And if you’d told me last week that everything I believed about the worst day of my life was a lie, I would have said you were cruel for even suggesting it. But here I am, sitting in my living room, holding a court document that says murder in the first degree where I once believed it should say genetic tragedy.
The call came on a Tuesday. I remember the mundane details with perfect clarity because I was organizing returns at the bookstore where I work, sorting through romance novels with their glossy covers and their impossible promises of happy endings that had always felt like a personal mockery. For seven years, I had lived with the suffocating knowledge that my body, my genes, my very family line had poisoned my three-week-old son, Noah. For seven years, my ex-husband Devon’s words echoed in my head, a relentless mantra of my failure: Your defective genes killed our baby.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. You need to understand who we were before you can understand what they did to us—to Noah, and to me.
I was thirty-one when I met Devon Hartwell at a medical conference in downtown Chicago. I wasn’t attending as a professional; I was the librarian hired to organize the research materials for the presenters. Devon was there representing his family’s pharmaceutical company, all sharp suits and a sharper smile. He had this way of making you feel like you were the only person in a room full of hundreds. His mother, Vera, would later call it the “Hartwell charm,” as if it were some sort of birthright passed down through generations of successful, powerful men.
“You’re not like the usual medical crowd,” he’d said, finding me restacking journals during the lunch break. “You actually seem to enjoy what you’re doing.”
“Books don’t argue back,” I’d replied, and his laugh had been genuine and warm, not the calculated chuckle I’d later learn to recognize.
Devon pursued me with the same laser-focused intensity he applied to his sales targets. Flowers were delivered to the elementary school library where I worked. Surprise lunches appeared where he’d show up with soup from my favorite deli. He even volunteered to read to the kindergarteners one afternoon, his voice animated as he acted out all the characters in their favorite picture book. The teachers swooned. The principal joked about cloning him.
His mother, Vera, was less impressed. The first time Devon brought me to their family estate, a sprawling Victorian mansion that had been in the Hartwell family for generations, she studied me like I was a specimen under a microscope.
“Bethany,” she’d said, drawing out each syllable as if tasting a foreign, unpleasant word. “Such a common name. And you’re a librarian? How… quaint. I suppose everyone has their calling.”
She was a retired nurse who’d married into pharmaceutical money, and she wore her husband’s success like armor. Every interaction with her felt like a test I was failing. But Devon stood by me, or so I thought. “Don’t mind Mother,” he’d say. “She’s just protective. Once we give her grandchildren, she’ll soften.”
We married two years after that first meeting. The wedding was everything Vera wanted: a country club reception, ice sculptures, a string quartet playing classical pieces I didn’t recognize. My family looked deeply uncomfortable in their rented formal wear, while Devon’s side glided through the event as if they’d been born in tuxedos. My sister, Camille, pulled me aside during the reception, whispering, “Beth, are you sure about this? They seem to think we’re the entertainment.”
But I was sure. I was in love.
When I found out I was pregnant six months later, Devon’s unrestrained joy seemed to validate every doubt I’d ever pushed aside. He transformed overnight into the perfect expectant father. Baby books stacked on his nightstand, prenatal vitamins organized by the day of the week. He even installed an app on his phone that showed him what size fruit our baby matched each week. “Week sixteen,” he’d announce at breakfast. “Our son is the size of an avocado.”
“Could be a daughter,” I’d remind him.
“Hartwell men produce sons,” he’d say with such unshakeable certainty. “Three generations of firstborn boys. It’s practically genetic destiny.”
That word, genetic, would come to haunt me in ways I couldn’t possibly imagine as I sat there, hand on my growing belly, believing with all my heart in our shared future.
Vera had insisted on genetic testing early in the pregnancy. “Just to be safe,” she’d said, her tone implying great risk. “With your family history being so… unclear.”
My family history. My parents were both adopted, from closed adoptions in the 1960s when records were sealed tighter than a drum. We knew nothing about our biological grandparents, our medical histories, our ancestral conditions. It had never mattered before. It shouldn’t have mattered then.
But when Noah arrived three weeks early, tiny but perfect with Devon’s nose and my eyes, none of that seemed important. For exactly eleven days, we were a perfect, blissful family. Devon would rush home from work to hold him. I’d often find them in the nursery, Devon whispering promises about future baseball games and business lessons, about the legacy he would one day build for his son.
Then came day twelve. Noah wouldn’t eat. His tiny body burned with a sudden, raging fever. The pediatrician sent us straight to the emergency room, and suddenly, our perfect family was living in the NICU, watching machines breathe for our son while doctors spoke in hushed tones about metabolic disorders and genetic mutations.
The image that haunts me most isn’t from the day Noah died. It’s from two days before, when the genetic counselor pulled us into a small, airless room with inspirational posters about chromosomes and heredity. It’s the memory of Devon’s face as she explained the rare recessive gene disorder supposedly inherited from my side. The way his hand slipped from mine as if I were contagious. The exact moment his love curdled into disgust.
“Your defective genes,” he’d said in the corridor afterward, while our son lay dying in an incubator just feet away. “You did this. You killed him.”
For seven years, I believed him. For seven years, I carried that guilt like a stone in my chest. Every baby I saw, every happy family in the bookstore, every pregnancy announcement on social media—they all whispered the same accusation: You killed him.
Until that Tuesday. Until Dr. Shannon Reeves called and said the words that changed everything. “Your son didn’t have a genetic disorder, Ms. Hartwell. Someone ended his life.”
And the someone had a face, a name, a set of keys to the NICU. The same woman who’d questioned my worthiness to marry her son had decided my baby wasn’t worthy to live. Vera Hartwell, with her perfect hair and pharmacy access, had injected a toxic substance into my three-week-old son’s IV line while I slept in a chair beside his incubator, exhausted from keeping vigil.
But I didn’t know that yet. Standing in my apartment that Tuesday afternoon, phone pressed to my ear, the world tilting off its axis as Dr. Reeves said, “Can you come to the hospital? There’s something you need to see.”
Seven years after losing Noah, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment above a bakery on the south side of Chicago. The smell of fresh bread at dawn was my only comfort some mornings, a reminder that life continued to rise despite everything. My apartment was sparse but clean, furnished with secondhand pieces that didn’t match but somehow worked together. Nothing like the Victorian house Devon and I had shared, with its original hardwood floors and leaded glass windows that threw rainbows across the nursery we’d painted a soft, hopeful yellow.
