Chapter 6
The headlights held steady across the road. Their glare erased the driver behind the windshield, but whoever sat there had chosen the one narrow bend that sealed us in.
Daniel looked toward the steep bank beside the pullout. “There’s an old service road above us.”
“Can we take it?”
“If the snow hasn’t buried it.”
“Then that’s where we’re going.”
He glanced at me—not to argue, or to decide for me. Just to make sure I meant it. I did.
We left his vehicle where it was and climbed the bank, the frozen ground crumbling beneath our boots. I kept one hand braced against a tree and the other pressed to my ribs, where the cold had found every tender place. Below, an engine revved once.
Daniel didn’t reach for me until I held out my hand.
The service road was barely more than a pair of ruts between the trees. We followed it away from the overlook, moving slowly enough that the distant headlights disappeared behind the ridge. By the time we reached the main road, my legs trembled with effort.
Daniel drove us back to the hospital by a longer route. We entered through a staff entrance Lena had arranged to keep quiet. A nurse glanced at my face, then at the shadows beneath my eyes, but said nothing about the hour I’d been gone.
Noah’s neonatal unit was on another floor. I didn’t go to him yet. First, Lena was waiting in a small family room with her arms folded tight across her chest.
“Someone came asking for Noah’s room,” she said.
The words struck harder than the climb down from the overlook. “Who?”
“They didn’t give a name. They said they were trying to find a family member.” Lena lowered her voice. “Security reviewed the corridor footage. Brooke Ellis was near the nursery.”
For one blank second, the room seemed to tilt. Brooke had stood beside Grant at my memorial, her face arranged into sorrow while he spoke over an empty casket.
“How near?”
“Close enough that security flagged it. She didn’t enter Noah’s room.” Lena paused. “But she was in that corridor.”
Daniel stepped closer, leaving space between us. “Did anyone see her with him?”
“Not that they’ve told me.”
I looked through the narrow window in the door. A cart rolled past, its wheels whispering over the floor. Somewhere beyond it, my son lay beneath warm lights, unaware that strangers were asking where to find him.
“Keep the room private,” I said. “No names on the board, no visitors unless I approve them. If anyone asks again, they don’t get an answer.”
Lena nodded. She didn’t tell me not to worry. I was grateful.
Tessa arrived carrying a thin paper folder and a look that made the room feel smaller.
“I found the archived checkout sheet,” she said. “The digital original is gone.”
“Gone how?”
“Not in the archive. Not in the backup I checked.” She set the folder on the table. “It was there when I started looking. Now the record’s been scrubbed.”
Daniel’s jaw tightened. “Can you tell who removed it?”
“Not yet. The access history is incomplete.” Tessa slid the sheet toward me. “This is a paper copy from an older storage file. It matches the equipment number on the tag.”
The photocopy was faded at the edges, the grid crowded with narrow handwriting. I found the equipment number, then read across the row. The item had been checked out to Grant’s office on the night of the fire.
A time had been written beside it: 1:42 a.m.
“Does this say who picked it up?” I asked.
“Not clearly. The signature line is smudged. But the office code is Grant’s.”
The soot-darkened tag Daniel had taken from the cabin sat inside its evidence sleeve near the folder. It looked small and ordinary against the printed rows. Still, I could see it in the snow by the north access path, close to a cabin Grant had told the world he never meant to lose.
Tessa tapped the sheet. “There’s a return notation at 3:11. No separate incident number. No explanation for why the equipment went out.”
I opened the memorial recording on my phone. Grant appeared in the black anniversary suit I’d bought him for our fifth anniversary. The collar sat perfectly against his throat; his grief seemed perfectly placed, too.
I remembered the way he’d rested a hand on the empty casket. I remembered the people watching him believe, or pretend to believe, that his wife and son were gone.
His recorded voice filled the room.
“I left the cabin before the fire took hold. I couldn’t get help from up there, so I drove down and called it in.”
I stopped the recording.
The checkout time stared up at me: 1:42. The fire had started before two. Grant’s account put him on the road, seeking help, before it took hold. But equipment assigned to his office had been checked out during that same window and found near the cabin afterward. The return time came later, after he had driven away with Brooke.
It wasn’t proof of who carried the equipment. It wasn’t proof of what it had been used for. But the story Grant had told at my funeral no longer fit neatly around the records.
“He said he left,” I whispered.
Tessa’s expression stayed guarded. “The paper doesn’t say who took it. And a return time doesn’t tell us who brought it back.”
“I know.” I set the phone beside the sheet. “It tells me his timeline has a hole in it.”
“And someone wanted the original gone,” Daniel said.
I folded my hands so Tessa wouldn’t see them shake. “Then we keep the copy. And we find out who had access before the file disappeared.”
Lena’s phone buzzed. She checked it, then looked up.
“Security sent a still from the corridor. They can identify Brooke clearly.”
She turned the screen toward me.
Brooke’s face was angled toward the nursery windows. Her coat was open, one hand near the visitor badge on her chest. The timestamp sat in the corner of the image: less than an hour before Lena called me.
The corridor stretched behind her to the unit doors.
She hadn’t entered Noah’s room. The footage didn’t show her speaking to anyone or looking through a window. It showed only where she had been—and how close she’d come.
I stared at her face, the same composed face that had watched Grant mourn me beside an empty casket.
Then I looked toward the door leading to my son.
May you like
Brooke might not know I was alive. She might not have seen Noah at all.
But she had been close enough to find out.
