Nora gasped. “Close. Too close. One is breech. My doctor said hospital.”
Elise’s face tightened, but her voice stayed steady.
“We’re going to take care of you. What are their names?”
Nora clung to the question. Names belonged to a future. Names meant babies who would be held, not lost.
“Owen,” she said. “And Isla.”
“Beautiful. Then let’s help Owen and Isla meet us safely.”
The next half hour was the longest Nora would ever remember and the most fragmented. A police officer asking who locked the door. Daniel telling him what he had heard. Elise holding Nora’s hand. A second ambulance arriving. The living room rug being covered with clean sheets. Nora saying Adrian’s name once, not as a plea anymore, but as a fact that had become evidence.
Owen came first.
He arrived small and bluish and silent for one terrible second that stretched wider than the whole room. Then a paramedic worked over him, and a thin cry rose into the stormy air.
Nora broke.
She sobbed not from pain but from recognition. That was her son. That impossible sound was her son.
“He’s here,” Elise said. “He’s breathing.”
Isla was harder.
Nora saw it in the way the paramedics moved. In the quick look they exchanged. In the radio call that became more urgent. She was aware of the stretcher beneath her, the ceiling turning, rain on someone’s jacket, Daniel standing near the doorway with his hands clasped so tightly his knuckles were white.
“My daughter,” Nora whispered.
“We have her,” Elise said. “We’re moving now.”
By the time Adrian returned, Nora had not yet left the house. The paramedics had stabilized her enough to transport her, and the second team had taken Isla ahead. Owen was bundled in a pink hospital blanket because that was what had been closest in the kit, tucked safely in the arms of a medic near the door.
The front door opened before anyone could stop it.
Adrian stepped inside laughing at something Camilla had said. Leona followed, carrying a boutique bag from the hotel gift shop. Martin shook rain from his umbrella onto the porch.
Their laughter died one breath at a time.
Police lights washed across the walls. A broken kitchen doorframe stood visible through the hall. Medical wrappers lay near the sofa. The living room smelled of antiseptic and rain and fear.
Then Adrian saw Nora on the stretcher.
His face went gray.
“What happened?”
No one answered at first. The silence did it for them.
The officer, a broad man with tired eyes, turned toward him.
“Are you Adrian Vale?”
Adrian looked at the officer, then at Nora, then at the tiny bundle in the paramedic’s arms.
“That’s my baby,” he said.
Nora closed her eyes.
My baby. Not our baby. Not Nora. Not are they alive.
Leona recovered first.
“This is completely unnecessary,” she said, stepping into the living room as if entering a room service complaint. “She should not have involved the police. We were gone for a short errand.”
Daniel, standing by the coffee table, looked at her with an expression Nora had never seen on his gentle face.
“You were gone for more than three hours,” he said.
Camilla’s mouth opened. “No, we weren’t.”
The officer glanced at his notes. “Three hours
