Chapter 2
The mother pulled her daughter tight against her chest and turned her whole body away from the sink.
Her mother started to rise again.
“Get out,” the baby’s mother said.
The grandmother opened her mouth, but her daughter repeated it before another excuse could come.
“Get out of my house.”
She stayed between the baby and her mother until the older woman finally backed away from the kitchen.
I was still standing beside the counter with my torn sleeve hanging loose when something on the cabinet caught my eye.
Five scratches.
They had been carved into the cabinet beside the sink, close enough together that I might have dismissed them as ordinary damage if I hadn’t already been staring at every detail in that kitchen differently.
But I knew those marks.
There were five of them.
May you like
And I had previously treated that same baby on five separate dates.
I counted the scratches again, then looked at the child’s mother and slowly pointed toward the cabinet so she could see exactly what I had just noticed.
