Chương 2
Sixteen weeks.
He counted backward despite himself. A hotel in Newport after the maritime insurance conference. Sarah barefoot by the window, eating vending-machine pretzels because the restaurant kitchen had closed. Declan telling her they should stop before they ruined something neither of them could name. Sarah asking whether he meant their careers or his reputation.
He had not answered.
The paramedics arrived with security behind them. The office filled quickly: equipment cases, wet coats, clipped questions, the soft tear of packaging. One paramedic knelt beside Sarah while another asked Declan what had happened.
“She collapsed. Possible thallium exposure.”
“Known ingestion?”
“We don’t know.”
“Any vomiting? Seizure activity? Chest pain?”
Sarah answered for herself, her voice thin but clear. “Nausea. Burning in my feet. Hair coming out. Trouble sleeping. Sometimes my heart races.”
“How long?”
“Three weeks. Maybe four.”
Declan stared at her.
She kept her eyes on the paramedic.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
The paramedic glanced up. “Sir, let us work.”
Declan stepped back.
A security officer reached toward the steel bottle.
“Don’t touch that,” Declan said.
The officer froze.
The senior paramedic looked at the bottle, then at the report in Declan’s hand. “Leave it exactly where it is. Police may need it. Has anyone else handled it since she went down?”
“Only she did.”
Thomas appeared in the doorway behind the paramedics.
“I kicked it when I caught her,” Declan added.
Thomas’s eyes met his.
No accusation passed between them. Not yet.
Sarah was placed on a stretcher. She resisted the oxygen mask long enough to tell the paramedic she was pregnant.
“How far along?”
“Sixteen weeks.”
Declan looked down at the ultrasound still in his hand.
Thomas heard the answer. His composure changed by less than an inch, but Declan had known him since he was fourteen. He saw the slight pause before Thomas inhaled.
The stretcher rolled toward the elevator.
Declan followed.
Thomas caught his arm. “You can’t leave the office open with those reports on the floor.”
Declan looked at the hand on his sleeve until Thomas removed it.
“Lock the floor. No one touches anything. Not the bottle, not the papers, not her bag.”
“Deck.”
“Stop calling me that.”
The elevator doors began to close. Thomas stayed outside.
Declan watched him through the narrowing gap.
Thomas’s face remained calm until the doors met.
The ambulance carried Sarah to Massachusetts General through streets washed silver by rain. Declan rode in the front because the paramedics needed room to work. He sat with both hands braced against his knees while the driver spoke into the radio and windshield wipers struck a frantic rhythm.
His phone filled with calls.
Chief of security.
General counsel.
The chairman of the board.
Thomas.
Declan answered none of them.
At the emergency entrance, a nurse asked his relationship to the patient.
He said, “Her employer.”
The answer tasted cowardly.
Sarah vanished through double doors while hospital staff led him to a waiting area with molded chairs, a silent television, and a vending machine that hummed louder than it should have. His shirt cuffs were streaked with gray from the office floor. A thin red mark crossed one palm where the ultrasound photograph had cut him.
He sat beneath a sign asking visitors not to use speakerphone.
For twenty-three minutes, no one told him anything.
He called Sarah’s mother from Sarah’s phone because her emergency contact was easy to find.
Elaine Mitchell answered on the fourth ring.
“Sarah?”
“This is Declan Hale.”
Silence.
He heard a television in the background and the small metallic click of a lamp being switched on.
“Why do you have my daughter’s phone?”
“She collapsed at the office. We’re at Mass General.”
Elaine did not gasp. She did not ask what happened. Her breathing changed, and then her voice became practical.
“Is she conscious?”
“Sometimes.”
“What did the doctors say?”
“They’re evaluating her.”
“What happened?”
“We believe she may have been poisoned.”
The television went silent.
Elaine said, “You believe?”
“She had a laboratory report.”
“What laboratory report?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“What did you do to her?”
Declan closed his eyes.
“Nothing.”
“You’re her boss. You call at one thirty in the morning from her phone, tell me she has been poisoned, and expect me to begin with trust?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“She’s pregnant.”
The words left him before he decided to say them.
Another silence followed, this one different.
“I know,” Elaine said.
Declan looked through the glass doors toward the corridor where Sarah had disappeared.
“How long have you known?”
“Long enough to know she was terrified of telling you.”
He bent forward, pressing the phone to his ear.
“Why?”
“You’ll have to ask yourself that on the drive home.”
“I’m not going home.”
“Neither am I.”
She ended the call.
A detective arrived at two seventeen. Her name was Leila Moreno, and she wore plain clothes beneath a raincoat that had not kept her dry. She showed Declan her badge, sat two chairs away, and asked him to repeat the events without using conclusions.
He described the collapse, the envelope, the report, Sarah’s statement about Thomas, and the bottle.
“Who is Thomas?”
“My chief operating officer.”
“Your relationship with him?”
“He worked for my father. He has been with the company twenty-six years.”
“That’s not a relationship.”
Declan looked at her.
“He raised me after my father stopped having time.”
Moreno wrote something in a small notebook.
“Does he know Ms. Mitchell is pregnant?”
“He does now.”
“Did he know before tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you?”
“I didn’t.”
The detective’s pen stopped.
“Are you the father?”
Declan stared at the dark screen of the waiting-room television. His reflection looked older than it had that morning.
“Yes.”
“How long have you and Ms. Mitchell been in a relationship?”
“We aren’t.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“We were involved briefly. It ended four months ago.”
“Before or after she became pregnant?”
May you like
“I didn’t know she was pregnant.”
Moreno’s expression did not change. “Why were the two of you in the office after one in the morning?”
