Chapter 1 - FIVE IN THE MORNING
At 5:03 a.m., a Westchester County police officer called and told me they had found my pregnant daughter at an empty bus stop.
Emma was barefoot.
Soaked through.
Half-conscious.
By the time I reached the shelter, freezing rain was cutting sideways across the road. Red and blue lights flashed through the glass panels, turning the puddles beneath the bench into broken pieces of color.
Then I saw her.
My twenty-four-year-old daughter lay curled on the muddy pavement with both arms wrapped around her five-month-pregnant belly. Her gray hoodie was soaked through, her feet were pale from the cold, and one side of her face had swollen beneath her wet brown hair.
“Emma!”
I dropped into the mud beside her.
Officer Hayes was already kneeling near her with a flashlight. Officer Miller stood between us and the road while an ambulance turned into the intersection.
“It’s me, baby.” I touched Emma’s cheek as gently as I could. “Mom’s here.”
Her eyelids fluttered.
“Who did this?”
Emma coughed and gripped my wrist with startling force.
“The silver,” she whispered.
“What silver?”
“I didn’t polish it right.”
Her breathing caught.
“Victoria held my hair. Carter used the club.”
My blood went cold.
Carter Whitmore was her husband.
Victoria was his mother.
Emma pressed one hand harder against her stomach.
“I told them it was hurting the baby.”
“What did they say?”
Her lips barely moved.
“They said the baby was a mistake.”
The paramedics lifted her onto a stretcher. As they moved her toward the ambulance, Officer Hayes shone his light across muddy tire tracks beside the curb.
They came from a large vehicle.
The tracks stopped directly beside the bus shelter.
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Someone had not merely allowed Emma to wander into the storm.
Someone had brought her there.
