Chapter 6 - The Kitchen Floor
"Mommy was holding my legs," Lily whispered.
The examination room fell into a terrifying, absolute silence. The only sound was the distant hum of the facility's air conditioning system and the faint scrape of Emma's crayon against her coloring book in the corner.
"Mommy held my legs," Lily repeated, as if repeating a lesson she had been forced to memorize. "Because I was crying too loud and kicking the cabinets. Caleb said he had to get the thing out before the police came."
"What thing, Lily?" I choked out, my hand trembling as I squeezed her tiny fingers. "What was inside your shoulder?"
"The black box," Lily said simply.
My mind reeled. "The... the black box?"
"The little square thing," Lily continued, her voice devoid of emotion, as if she were describing a cartoon she had watched weeks ago. "Caleb put it under my skin last month so he could know where Mommy and I were going. But then he said the battery was dying and it was making noise, so he had to cut it out before it started beep-beeping."
A deep, sickening horror flooded my entire body. A tracking device. An illegal, cheap GPS tracker implanted beneath the skin of a seven-year-old child by a paranoid, abusive man—and my own sister had held her daughter down on a kitchen table while he cut it out with an unsterilized blade.
Nurse Martha stood up smoothly, her face pale as granite. She didn't say a word to us. She walked directly to the wall-mounted internal phone, dialed a three-digit extension, and spoke into the receiver with cold, rapid precision.
"This is Room 4 in Pediatrics. I need Social Services, the attending pediatric surgeon, and hospital security in this room immediately. We have a active, severe child abuse and torture case. Lock down the wing doors."
Before Martha could even hang up the phone, the heavy wooden door of Room 4 burst open.
It wasn't a doctor.
Sarah stood in the doorway.
Her hair was a wild, disheveled nest around her face. Her scarf was gone, revealing dark, deep purple bruises wrapping around her throat like a necklace. Her eyes were bloodshot, frantic, and wild with a terrifying mixture of fear and rage.
Behind her, towering in the narrow hospital corridor, was Caleb. He wore a faded black baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his heavy canvas jacket. Through the glass panel of the door, I could see two hospital security guards approaching them from the far end of the hallway.
"Give her to me," Sarah breathed, taking a staggering step into the room, reaching out her hands toward Lily. "Rachel, give me my daughter right now! You have no right to do this!"
May you like
Lily let out a ear-splitting, blood-curdling scream—the first loud noise she had made all weekend—and threw her entire body behind my back, wrapping her arms around my waist, hiding her face against my denim jeans.
"Get out of here, Sarah!" I roared, stepping directly between my sister and her daughter, my fists clenching into iron balls. "Don't you dare come near her!"
