Chapter 2 - THE WOMAN I HELPED COME HOME
Toby remained in the pediatric intensive-care unit.
His breathing improved, but the doctors wanted continuous monitoring until the drug cleared. The child-protection team restricted Cassandra’s access while police and county social workers determined how the substance entered his body.
Elijah was allowed to remain because there was no evidence yet that he had administered it.
I was not allowed at Toby’s bedside except as a physician during an emergency.
Legally, I was still his stepmother until the divorce became final. That gave me no automatic right to make medical decisions or demand visitation.
The rule was appropriate.
It still hurt.
I watched him through the glass from the consultation hallway. Even asleep, Toby held the corner of his blanket the way he had when he was two.
“He asked for you last month,” Elijah said behind me.
I turned.
“Then why didn’t you call?”
His eyes dropped.
Six months earlier, Cassandra had shown him documents suggesting I transferred $1.8 million from Sherman Family Holdings to a private account linked to a competing biotechnology firm.
The bank headers were correct. The transaction codes were plausible. My electronic approval appeared on every page.
I told Elijah they were false.
I could not explain everything I had been doing because I had confidentially reported irregularities in the proposed Neuravax acquisition to an outside ethics committee. Disclosure before the review was complete could have violated professional obligations and damaged an investigation.
My refusal sounded like evasion.
Cassandra supplied the explanation Elijah already feared: that I married him for access, then tried to profit from his company.
He removed me from the house in front of reporters waiting for an acquisition announcement.
“Take whatever jewelry you came with,” he told me. “You’ve already stolen enough.”
Toby stood behind the housekeeper, crying my name.
Elijah prevented me from going to him.
That was the memory I could not fit inside any polite description of divorce.
Cassandra had once been Elijah’s college girlfriend and Toby’s biological mother. After his birth, she relapsed, disappeared for months, and eventually entered long-term treatment. Elijah received sole custody.
When she returned sober, I was the person who argued that Toby deserved a carefully supervised relationship with her.
Elijah believed I was being naive.
Cassandra called me compassionate.
Neither word survived.
Now she sat in a hospital interview room with an attorney, claiming the bottle belonged to Elijah.
“She says you’ve been taking sleep drops,” I told him.
“I’ve never taken NRX-18.”
“Did you know she had access to it?”
“She worked on the Neuravax integration team.”
That was new.
“What position?”
“Family-office liaison.”
“Cassandra has no biotechnology training.”
“She knew the founders socially.”
“You gave your girlfriend access to a restricted-drug acquisition because she knew people at parties?”
“She helped close the deal.”
I thought of the ethics memo I had submitted before Elijah expelled me. Neuravax’s safety data contained unexplained gaps, and several research batches were inadequately tracked.
Cassandra had told Elijah my concerns were an attempt to sabotage him.
“Who authorized her badge?” I asked.
“I did.”
The answer gave the compound a believable route into the Sherman home.
It also gave Elijah responsibility he could not purchase his way around.
A social worker named Dana Cole joined us.
“Toby is awake,” she said. “He told the child interviewer that Cassandra gave him sweet drops when he cried at night.”
Elijah stared at her.
“How often?”
“He cannot give a reliable count. He said ‘lots of bedtime days.’”
The acute overdose was no longer the only concern.
The team ordered specialized testing on Toby’s hair to look for repeated exposure. They requested Elijah’s voluntary blood and hair samples as well.
He agreed immediately.
Cassandra refused until her attorney arrived.
Before Dana left, she added, “Toby also said the medicine goes in Daddy’s coffee when Daddy gets angry.”
Elijah gripped the back of a chair.
“That’s not possible.”
I remembered the final months of our marriage: meetings Elijah forgot, dinners where his words slowed after one glass of wine, mornings when he accused me of moving documents he had signed himself.
I had believed he was exhausted.
Then resentful.
Then cruel.
Perhaps all three were true.
The toxicologist entered with the first detailed bottle analysis.
It was not a patient formulation.
It was a concentrated calibration solution used by Neuravax’s research laboratory—approximately ten times stronger than the diluted compound used in monitored trials.
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Someone who understood the product had removed it from controlled storage.
And someone had been measuring it in a home with a four-year-old child.
