“Down, buddy,” Jack murmured, nudging him aside with his knee without breaking the kiss. Oscar took the hint and trotted toward the stairs, tags jingling in the dark.
Muffled laughter mixed with kisses as Jack navigated the hallway and started up after him. His foot caught on the top step, and we nearly went down—but he caught himself against the wall, my back pressing into the plaster.
“Smooth,” I teased.
“You’re distracting me.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re breathing.” He kissed my neck, my jaw, the corner of my mouth. “That’s enough.”
He carried me the rest of the way to our bedroom and kicked the door shut behind us.
CHAPTER FIVE
The hospital corridor was empty.
I knew this hallway. It was the third floor of Augusta General, the maternity ward where I’d done my OB rotation a lifetime ago. Same mint-green walls, same scuffed linoleum, same fluorescent lights buzzing overhead with that faint flicker that always made the shadows jump. But it was wrong the way things are wrong in dreams. Too quiet. Too empty. The nurses’ station dark and unmanned, the whiteboard wiped clean.
My baby was crying.
The sound echoed off the walls, bouncing and distorting until I couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from. But I knew. Room 3012, end of the hall. I could see the door from where I stood. Thirty feet, maybe less. Close enough to read the number on the placard.
I started running.
The floor was slick under my bare feet. I was wearing scrubs, and my hands were bare, no gloves, no ring, nothing. Just skin. I pumped my arms and drove my legs and the door didn’t get any closer. The hallway stretched ahead of me, the linoleum unfurling like a tongue, and the faster I ran the farther the door pulled away.
The crying got louder.
Not the patient, waiting cry of a hungry baby. This was different. This was the sharp, hitching wail of an infant in distress. It was a cry that activates something primal in your chest, something deeper than thought, something that says move faster.
“I’m coming,” I said, and my voice sounded strange, flat and echoless, swallowed by the empty corridor. “I’m right here.”
I ran harder. My lungs burned. My feet slapped the linoleum and I could hear my own breathing, ragged and desperate, and the door was still thirty feet away. Still exactly thirty feet away. I could see the handle, brushed steel, could see the thin strip of light under the door, could see the shadow of movement on the other side.
Someone was in the room with her.
I could see it through the narrow window in the door—a shape, a figure, moving around the bassinet. Not rushing. Not panicked. Calm. Deliberate. The way people moved when they had authority. When they belonged.
“Stop!” I screamed. The word came out muffled, like screaming into a pillow. My legs were heavy now, thick and clumsy, every stride like pushing through water. “Don’t touch her! Get away from her!”
The figure didn’t turn. Didn’t acknowledge me. Just continued moving with that terrible, unhurried calm while my daughter screamed and I couldn’t close the distance.
Still close, but so far away. The numbers on the door were clear as day and I could not reach them.
I threw myself forward, and the floor shifted, went soft, went wrong. My feet tangled. I went down hard, palms slapping the linoleum, knees cracking against the floor. The pain was real, sharp and bright, the kind of pain that doesn’t happen in dreams.
The crying stopped.
And I knew.
Not the way I knew things as a coroner. Clinical, detached, the careful logic of evidence and examination. This was different. This was deeper. A knowledge that lived somewhere beneath my ribs, beneath my training, in a part of me I hadn’t known existed until ten weeks ago. The same part that had made my hand go to my stomach before I’d even taken the test. The same part that woke me in the night to check on something that didn’t even have a heartbeat yet.
A mother knows.
Something was wrong. Something was already done. And I was too late.
I scrambled to my feet and the hallway was gone. I was at the door. My hand was on the handle, cold steel under my palm, and I pushed.
