Chapter 2 - The Week Judith Became Indispensable
Mallory took Maisie straight to urgent care.
Harper came too, one hand pressed against a wad of gauze on her lip, the bracelets sealed inside a sandwich bag in her purse.
The pediatric nurse checked Maisie from head to toe. The baby’s color was good. Her temperature was normal. No bruising. No signs of injury. The dirt had touched only the blanket.
That should have settled them.
It didn’t.
Mallory sat in the exam room rocking Maisie with mechanical, exhausted movements, as if her body remembered what to do while her mind was somewhere else entirely.
“She signed my discharge paperwork,” Mallory said finally.
Harper turned toward her.
“What?”
“The day Maisie was born. I had that magnesium drip because my blood pressure wouldn’t come down. They said I was groggy and shouldn’t sign anything until I was steadier. Mom handled some of it.”
Harper remembered the week vividly now. Mallory had delivered at Riverside Methodist in Columbus after a brutal labor and postpartum preeclampsia scare. Harper had been driving back from Cincinnati when the baby was born. By the time she arrived, Judith was already installed in the maternity room like she belonged there, correcting nurses, answering questions, carrying Mallory’s phone.
“You never mentioned another bracelet.”
“I never saw one.”
Mallory looked down at Maisie.
“Mom kept saying weird things, though.”
“What kind of things?”
Mallory swallowed.
“That Maisie didn’t look like anyone on our side. That hospitals make mistakes. That babies all come out of the nursery looking ‘borrowed’ at first.”
Harper felt something cold move down her back.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it sounded crazy. And because every time I got upset, she’d say I was overtired.”
That sounded like Judith.
Not a dramatic lie.
A smaller thing.
A way of making the other person distrust their own reaction.
On the drive back to Harper’s townhouse in Dublin, Mallory said she was not going to Judith’s house that night.
“What are you going to tell her?”
“The truth.”
Maisie whimpered in the car seat.
May you like
Mallory looked back at her daughter through tears she seemed too shocked to fully feel.
“I want to know why my mother had another baby’s hospital bracelet buried in a flowerpot,” she said. “And I want to know why she waited eight weeks to tell me she thought something was wrong.”
