“Smaller like… what? A teenager? A child?”
He held my gaze a second before answering.
“Possibly a child.”
A child.
The horror changed shape.
I don’t know how else to say it.
Until that moment, all my fear had been aimed in one direction—toward an adult failing so badly it had become violence. Toward anger. Neglect. Deliberate harm.
A child’s hands made the picture somehow both better and worse.
Better, because children do not hate babies the way adults sometimes can.
Worse, because harm without malice is harder to defend against.
When Daniel and Megan arrived thirty minutes later, both looked as if they had been dragged through cold water.
Megan rushed straight to the glass window of Noah’s room, one hand flying to her mouth the second she saw him lying there under the soft hospital light with that tiny IV in his hand.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Noah…”
Daniel came to me with the bewildered, stricken face of a man whose life had just become unrecognizable without his consent.
“Mom, what happened?”
I showed him the scan.
