A terrified mother and her newborn cower beneath a hospital bed. Inches away, white heels stop. A smiling nurse slowly bends down, raising a sinister syringe of glowing orange liquid toward them. Then, the heavy ward door abruptly bursts open.
CHAP 1 — The Nurse Who Knew Too Much
I should have been sleeping.
That is what everyone kept telling me.
“You need rest, Deborah.”
“Let the nurses help.”
“Your body has been through so much.”
They were right.
My son Thomas had been born one day earlier after seven years of fertility treatments, two surgeries, injections that bruised my stomach purple, and one miscarriage that nearly took the last soft part of me with it.
When they placed him on my chest, warm and furious and alive, I sobbed so hard the doctor had to remind me to breathe.
My husband Michael cried too.
At least, I thought he did.
He stood beside the bed in the delivery room, one hand over his mouth, staring at Thomas like a man looking at a miracle he had stopped believing in.
“We finally did it,” he whispered.
I believed him.
That was my first mistake.
The maternity room at St. Anne’s in Boston was cold, bright, and too clean. Pale fluorescent lights washed everything flat. The vital monitor blinked behind my bed. The metal frame beneath me cast heavy shadows on the floor. Thomas slept in a bassinet beside me, swaddled in light blue.
My daughter Lily sat in the chair near the window, curled inside her yellow cardigan, watching the door.
Lily was eight, but she had never been careless like other children. She noticed tone before words. She noticed when adults smiled too long. She noticed when my hands shook before I admitted I was scared.
So when Nurse Rachel came in for the third time that morning, Lily went silent.
Rachel was blonde, pretty in a sharp way, with a crisp white uniform and a smile that looked polished rather than kind.
“Time for your medication,” she said brightly.
I reached for the paper cup.
Lily’s small hand grabbed my wrist.
Rachel’s eyes flicked to her.
Only for a second.
But I saw it.
“Sweet girl,” Rachel said. “You must be Lily.”
My daughter stiffened.
I had never told Rachel Lily’s name.
I looked at the nurse.
“How did you know that?”
Rachel laughed lightly.
“Oh, it’s in the chart.”
It was not.
My chart listed one visitor: spouse, Michael Bennett.
Lily leaned close to my ear after Rachel left.
“Mom,” she whispered, “I don’t know that nurse.”
I tried to smile.
“That’s okay, baby. Hospitals have lots of nurses.”
Lily shook her head.
“No. I mean she knows me.”
That was when unease first entered the room and sat beside the bassinet.
By afternoon, my best friend Carol visited. She brought soup, clean socks, and the kind of look women give each other when they do not want to frighten children.
“She keeps coming in too often,” Carol murmured while Lily colored at the window. “That nurse.”
“I know.”
“Ask the doctor about the medicine.”
“I will.”
When Rachel returned with another pill, I pretended to swallow it.
Then I hid it in the bedside drawer.
Her smile tightened when she saw the empty cup.
May you like
For half a second, the mask slipped.
And beneath it, I saw anger.
