Chapter 3 - The Woman by the Window
Mae shoved a metal shelf against the door just as the handle twisted.
“We need another way out.”
“There isn’t one,” Leah said.
Mae pointed upward. A maintenance hatch sat above the back shelves.
“You first.”
“I just had a baby.”
“I noticed.”
The pounding became harder.
“Mae!” a man shouted. “Open this door!”
Mae climbed onto a box and forced the hatch loose. Dust fell into her hair.
A whisper came from above.
“Hurry.”
Leah froze.
A woman’s face appeared in the opening.
Simone—the polished patient who had shared Leah’s room before delivery.
Leah stared. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to keep you from losing your child.”
Mae lifted Noah carefully through the hatch. Simone took the bassinet mattress first, then the bundled infant against her chest.
Leah climbed with her stitches screaming.
They crawled through a cramped service space and dropped into an empty consultation room.
Simone locked the door.
“You’re not a patient,” Leah said.
“No.”
“Then who are you?”
Simone pulled off the silk robe, revealing jeans and a black shirt beneath it.
“My name is Simone Vega. I’m an investigative reporter.”
Mae cursed under her breath.
Simone continued. “For eleven months I’ve been looking into Briar Glen’s maternal psychiatric referrals. Nine women in eight years. Same hospital. Same consulting psychiatrist. Same family-placement charity.”
Leah looked at Noah.
“Where are the babies?”
“Some were returned. Some weren’t.”
“Why me?”
Simone held up her phone. On the screen was a photograph of Doreen standing beside the hospital board chairman at a fundraiser.
“Because every trail leads back to your mother-in-law.”
The hallway intercom crackled.
“Security alert. Infant abduction, fourth floor.”
Leah’s mouth fell open. “They’re saying I abducted my own baby?”
Simone gave a humorless smile. “That’s how they make everyone else chase you.”
Mae opened the consultation room’s back door.
At the far end of the corridor, two security officers appeared.
Between them stood Nathan.
He looked directly at Leah.
May you like
Simone had first noticed Briar Glen after a mother in Dayton sent her a box of documents and then stopped answering calls. The woman had spent three years trying to prove that a brief panic episode had been turned into a permanent custody case. Every appeal ran into the same names. "People think conspiracies look dramatic," Simone said. "Usually they look like forms, signatures, committees, and polite people saying policy requires it." Leah looked at Noah and realized how close paperwork had come to erasing her from his life.
And pointed.
