Chương 2
He appeared to hear the absurdity too.
“My mother is with them,” he said. “Maria won’t let anyone near them. I’m coming.”
Isabelle stepped between the stretcher and the open front doors.
Her face had recovered some of its practiced composure. Only her clasped hands betrayed her; the fingers pressed so tightly that the knuckles had blanched.
“Clara,” she said, “you need to tell them this was an accident.”
The paramedics stopped.
Damian’s expression changed, not into rage but into something colder.
Clara looked at Isabelle over the raised rail of the stretcher. Isabelle’s polished blonde hair, diamond earrings, and champagne sequin gown remained flawless. She looked like the woman the photographers had arrived to see. Clara, with her loosened bun and cut apron, looked like the disaster servants were normally paid to remove.
“What part?” Clara asked. “The vial or the children?”
Charles Crane made an impatient sound. “She’s in shock. Get her to the hospital.”
“No,” Isabelle said quickly. “She knows what she’s doing.”
Clara’s next contraction climbed through her back. She closed her eyes and counted four slow breaths before answering.
“Yes,” she said. “I do now.”
At St. Catherine’s Medical Center, the twins were examined in pediatric emergency even though neither had swallowed the juice. Damian insisted. The boys resisted everyone until Maria arrived with their stuffed fox and rabbit from the nursery. She had changed out of her kitchen clogs but still wore the flour-marked shirt.
Clara lay one floor above them in obstetric triage while a nurse cleaned her palm and picked out two grains of glass with tweezers. A fetal monitor traced the baby’s heartbeat in green lines across a screen. Each strong, regular pulse loosened something in Clara’s chest, though the contractions continued at uneven intervals.
Damian sat beside the window, his suit jacket folded over the back of the chair. His black tie had been loosened, but nothing else about him suggested disorder. Even grief had failed to make him physically careless after his wife died. He could sit awake for two nights beside a hospital bed and still remember where he had placed his cuff links.
Today, his steel watch remained streaked with Clara’s blood.
He noticed her looking at it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“Your watch.”
Damian stared at her for several seconds. Then he covered his face with one hand.
The laugh that escaped him was short and without humor. “Clara.”
She looked down at the bandage on her palm.
The nurse continued adjusting the monitor. “People apologize for strange things in this room.”
“I’m employed to keep his house clean.”
“You are currently excused.”
Damian’s hand dropped. “You’re not employed to bleed politely.”
The nurse glanced between them but said nothing.
Clara’s eyes burned. She was not sure whether the tears came from pain, relief, humiliation, or the shock of being spoken to as if she were someone whose blood mattered. She turned toward the monitor.
“Are the boys all right?”
“They didn’t ingest anything,” Damian said. “The pediatrician is observing them. My mother is on her way.”
“And Isabelle?”
“The police separated everyone at the house. They collected the vial and the pitcher fragments.”
Clara swallowed. “Did she leave?”
“No.”
“Did her father?”
“He tried.”
That sounded so much like Charles Crane that Clara almost smiled.
The nurse finished dressing Clara’s hand. “The obstetrician will want to watch these contractions for a while. Stress can trigger them. Dehydration doesn’t help.”
“I drank water.”
“When?”
Clara tried to remember. Breakfast had been at six fifteen, standing at the kitchen island while cutting crusts from toast. At ten she had carried flowers from the service entrance. At noon, Isabelle had sent back the staff lunch because the smell of onions might linger when guests arrived.
“Morning,” she said.
The nurse gave Damian a look that had nothing to do with medicine and left.
Clara watched the door close. “Please don’t fire Maria.”
“Why would I fire Maria?”
“She called Isabelle a poisonous peacock.”
“When?”
“About ten minutes before the ambulance came.”
“I’ll give her a raise.”
Another contraction pressed across Clara’s abdomen. She breathed carefully and waited for it to pass. Damian rose but did not touch her.
“How long has this been happening?” he asked.
“The contractions?”
“The rest of it.”
She knew what he meant.
The question had been waiting between them since the foyer.
Clara rubbed the edge of the hospital blanket between her thumb and bandaged palm. “I saw Isabelle with a vial before.”
Damian became very still.
“When?”
“Six weeks ago.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
It was not an accusation yet. That made it worse.
“I didn’t know what it was.”
“You saw her put something in the boys’ drink six weeks ago?”
“No.” Clara’s voice sharpened. “She told me it was prescribed for Lucas.”
“What was prescribed?”
“Drops. To help him settle at night.”
Damian’s eyes fixed on her face.
“Lucas has no sleep prescription.”
“I know that now.”
The fetal monitor continued its steady rhythm. In the hall, a cart squeaked past, followed by a woman complaining that someone had taken her phone charger. Ordinary hospital life moved around Clara’s confession.
Damian sat again, but farther forward in the chair. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
Clara wanted to postpone it. She wanted the obstetrician to enter, or Maria to call, or the machine to alarm for a harmless reason. She wanted one more minute in which Damian believed her without qualification.
Instead, she told him.
Six weeks earlier, Lucas had been waking before dawn and crying for his mother. Not for Isabelle, not for Clara, but for Evelyn Reed, who had been dead for nineteen months. At three years old, he understood death as a location adults refused to visit. Some mornings he asked whether they could drive there after breakfast.
May you like
Isabelle had come into the nursery carrying a small silver vial.
“She said his pediatrician had approved it,” Clara said. “She put two drops in a spoonful of applesauce. She asked me to give it to him after his bath.”
