I stared at the screen until the letters blurred. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, then went still. If Jason knew I was here, he’d come. If he came, I wouldn’t be able to pretend anymore. I wouldn’t be able to play dumb while I figured out what I was dealing with.
Dr. Patel watched my face. “He’s contacting you,” he said, like it was a diagnosis.
“I can’t lie to him,” I whispered, even though I already was. “I’m not built for this.”
“You don’t have to be built for it,” he replied. “You just have to survive it.”
He explained what he could without breaking hospital policy: they were reviewing footage, filing an internal report, and notifying law enforcement. But he also admitted something that made my skin prickle—Jason had been persuasive, charming, and calm. He hadn’t shouted or panicked. He’d asked precise questions, like he already knew what he wanted and which doors to test.
Before I left, Dr. Patel grabbed a notepad and wrote one sentence in block letters: DO NOT GO HOME ALONE. Then he handed me the paper and said, “If he suspects you know anything, he may try to control the story.”
Control the story. That phrase followed me down the hallway like footsteps.
In the parking garage, I sat in my car and forced myself to breathe. I texted Jason back: “At my sister’s. I can’t talk.” Then I called my sister, Karen, and told her to meet me at a coffee shop five minutes away. I didn’t explain everything on the phone—just enough to make her hurry.
When Karen arrived, she took one look at my face and grabbed my hands across the table. “Linda, what happened? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“It’s not a ghost,” I said. My voice cracked. “It’s Jason.”
I told her everything—Dr. Patel’s warning, the visitor log, the medication, the unimaginable fact that Emily’s baby was missing. Karen’s lips parted, then pressed into a hard line.
“Okay,” she said, steadying herself. “We don’t react. We gather facts. Emily had a laptop, right? And a phone?”
“My house,” I whispered. “Jason has keys.”
“Then we don’t go to your house,” she said. “We go to Emily’s apartment. She kept her old iPad there. Remember? She used it for baby name lists.”
Emily’s apartment was across town. We drove separately, checking our mirrors too often. When we got inside, Karen headed straight for the bedroom and found the iPad in a drawer, exactly where Emily used to hide it from herself when she wanted to “be present.”
The screen lit up with her passcode still saved. My heart clenched at the normalcy of it—Emily’s favorite photo of a sunset, her calendar full of prenatal appointments, her notes titled “Baby Stuff.”
Then Karen opened Emily’s email.
A thread popped up with the subject line: “NDA and payment schedule.”
I felt my lungs stop working.
The sender wasn’t a friend. It wasn’t a doctor.
It was a law office.
Karen scrolled, eyes widening. “Linda… this is about a ‘confidential family arrangement.’ And—” She swallowed. “There’s a name here.”
She turned the screen toward me.
Jason Carter.
And below it, a sentence that turned my grief into something sharper and colder:
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