Chương 4
At 6:14, Lucy had not yet taken a breath in the world.
At 6:14, somebody had written down that all of them were finished.
She remembered Tasha returning.
Not in scrubs anymore.
A gray cardigan over them.
Tasha leaned close and said, “Mrs. Cole, I need you to listen to me.”
Mara had laughed because she was drugged enough that the seriousness of the sentence seemed absurd.
Tasha did not laugh.
“If they move you again, don’t let them separate you from the babies.”
“What babies?”
“You’re going to have them.”
“That’s generally how this works.”
Even now, Mara remembered the offended look on Tasha’s face.
Then a contraction crushed everything else.
The twins were born not long after.
No operating room.
No emergency C-section.
The details came in broken pieces, but both children had been delivered vaginally in the private procedure suite.
Lucy first.
Evan minutes later.
Mara heard crying.
She remembered that with absolute clarity.
Then silence.
Not the babies.
The adults.
The room had gone quiet in a way people did not go quiet after healthy children were born.
“Where are they?” Mara asked.
Nobody answered.
A nurse lifted Lucy away.
Tasha said something sharp.
Voss replied, “Not here.”
Then Mara saw Evan only once.
A red face.
Dark wet hair.
A tiny shoulder.
After that somebody pressed medication into her IV.
The ceiling moved.
When Mara woke, she was alone.
No monitors.
No call button within reach.
Her IV had been removed.
The clock showed 7:02.
She got off the bed.
Fell.
Got up again.
Her legs barely worked.
The door was locked.
She started pounding.
Someone opened it from outside.
Not a nurse.
A man in dark transport scrubs.
Behind him, in the hallway, Mara saw two clear bassinets.
Cream blankets.
Two babies.
Her babies.
She pushed past him.
The man grabbed her.
That was where some of the scratches came from.
Not all.
She bit him.
Alvarez raised an eyebrow.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t remember?”
“I remember biting him. I wasn’t taking notes.”
Adrian looked down.
It was almost a laugh.
Almost.
Mara told the rest slowly.
Tasha appeared at the end of the hall.
She shouted at the transport worker to let Mara go.
He did not.
Mara knocked a metal tray off a cart.
She had not remembered that until now.
It struck the floor.
Something shattered.
People came through a door.
Tasha grabbed both bassinets and shoved them toward Mara.
“Service corridor. Go.”
Mara went.
She did not remember choosing to.
She remembered the wheels rattling over tile.
An alarm.
A door that would not open until she hit the metal bar twice.
Cold air.
A laundry loading area.
Someone chasing her.
The bassinets would not fit between two parked trucks, so she took the babies.
One in each arm.
She had no shoes.
She left the hospital through a loading entrance wearing a hospital wrap, carrying two newborns.
“How did you get home?” Alvarez asked.
“A cab.”
Adrian looked at her.
“A cab?”
“It was yellow.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
The driver had stared at her.
Mara gave him the penthouse address.
He asked whether she needed a hospital.
She said no.
He asked whether the babies were hers.
She said yes.
He did not ask again.
At a red light, he took off his jacket and handed it back to her because she was shivering.
She still had it.
It was probably on the penthouse floor.
Alvarez wrote that down.
“How did you know your husband would be home?”
“I didn’t.”
Adrian looked at her.
Mara met his eyes.
“I just knew it was the one place Voss wouldn’t control who came through the door.”
That hurt him.
She saw it.
She did not take it back.
Adrian had returned home twenty-three minutes before Mara.
St. Catherine’s had called him shortly after six fourteen.
A woman from “patient services” said there had been a catastrophic maternal event complicated by fetal distress. She told him Mara had died despite intervention and both infants had been lost.
He drove to the hospital.
Security would not let him beyond a private consultation floor because, they said, an internal safety review had temporarily restricted access.
He called Voss seventeen times.
No answer.
A hospital administrator named Leonard Shaw met him in a conference room.
Shaw gave him three pages of preliminary paperwork.
One sheet contained Mara’s name.
Two contained BABY A and BABY B.
All three had a time beside the word “pronounced.”
6:14 p.m.
Adrian had not noticed the impossibility.
He told Alvarez that without excuses.
“I saw her name,” he said. “After that I stopped reading.”
Shaw said formal identification would happen after the medical examiner was notified.
Adrian demanded to see Mara.
Shaw said he could not.
Adrian threatened to call police.
Shaw told him he was free to do that, but that the hospital was already “coordinating with the appropriate authorities.”
That phrase had stopped him.
Not because it meant anything.
Because it sounded like something that meant something.
“I let professional language do my thinking for me,” Adrian said.
Mara looked at him.
He did not look back.
He had gone home to wait for a call that never came.
Instead Mara arrived.
Then, eleven minutes later, the private elevator chimed.
Voss.
Alvarez closed her notebook.
“Why would Dr. Voss come to your home?”
“I don’t know,” Adrian said.
Mara did.
Or thought she did.
“She came to see whether I made it.”
The detective looked at her.
“You don’t know that.”
“No.”
Mara’s fingers tightened.
“But she looked at the babies before she looked at me.”
Alvarez nodded.
“That part I can use. What you think it means comes later.”
It irritated Mara.
May you like
Which was why she trusted her a little.
By sunrise, St. Catherine’s had issued a statement to police saying no deaths had been formally reported to the state and that the paperwork given to Adrian appeared to be “internal preliminary documentation of uncertain origin.”
