Chloe let out a sound that was half-whimper, half-gasp. She leaned forward slightly, coughing, her body wracked with tremors. She reached out and gripped my wrist with a strength that terrified me.
“The silver,” Chloe whispered, her voice sounding like grinding glass.
“What?” I leaned my ear close to her trembling lips, shielding her face from the rain with my body.
“I… I didn’t polish the tea service right,” Chloe gasped, hot tears leaking from her swollen eyes, mixing with the rain. “Eleanor… she held me down by my hair. Liam… he used the golf club. I begged them to stop. I told them about the baby… I told them it was hurting the baby.”
The entire world around me went dead silent. The pouring rain, the wailing sirens, the shouting officers—it all faded into a deafening white noise of pure, distilled, nuclear rage.
Liam Sterling, the husband. Eleanor Sterling, the mother-in-law. They had beaten this girl—this kind, gentle, pregnant girl—because of a smudge on a silver teapot. And then, instead of calling an ambulance, they had driven her five miles down a desolate highway and dumped her at a bus stop in the freezing rain to miscarry and die.
“Paramedics!” I screamed, my voice cracking, turning toward the flashing lights. “Help her! She’s pregnant! Help my baby!”
As the medics rushed forward with the stretcher, lifting her broken body, Chloe’s grip on my wrist suddenly went completely slack. Her hand fell away, hitting the muddy concrete. Her eyes rolled back into her head.
“She’s crashing!” one medic yelled, his hands flying over her chest. “We’re losing her pulse! We have a massive hemorrhage. Fetal distress is critical. Go, go, go!”
The heavy ambulance doors slammed shut, severing my connection to my daughter. As the siren began to wail—a long, mournful sound that felt less like a rescue and more like a funeral dirge—I stood entirely alone in the freezing rain. I looked down at my hands. They were covered in the dark mud of the roadside.
I didn’t get back in my truck to follow the ambulance right away. I stood there for a full, agonizing minute, staring into the dark, wet woods. I felt something inside my human soul wither and die, instantly replaced by something ancient, cold, and incredibly dangerous.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was the hospital.
“Sarah Hayes?” the voice asked. “You need to get to St. Jude’s. We are losing them both.”
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