Part 2
The Report from the Year Before

Lawson did not call for the car. He took Elena himself, Prescott ahead, two guards behind, through the side entrance the pH๏τographers had never mapped. The hospital corridor smelled of antiseptic and warm plastic. At the glᴀss he stopped her with a hand that did not quite touch her arm.

“You look. You do not speak to them unless I say so. If you are lying, you will not leave this building with that necklace.”

“I’m not lying,” she said.

Jonah was awake. Blythe was not. The boy’s eyes moved from his father to the woman in the wet coat and stayed there, wary, the way he looked at new nurses.

Elena’s breath caught. She put her fingers on the glᴀss and then took them off, as if she had remembered a rule. “They have her mouth,” she said, almost to herself. “She said they would.”

Back in the consultation room Lawson spread the report under the lamp. Seven years old. Both names. A panel of markers he did not know and one phrase he did, circled in a hand he recognized because he had lived beside it: do not let them treat this as standard.

“Genevieve had this before they were born,” he said.

“She had it before she was sure she could keep them,” Elena said. “A clinic your doctors were never told about. The leukemia isn’t arriving from nowhere. Something was introduced. Something that looks like disease on every scan your hospital runs, and doesn’t answer to the drugs they keep escalating.” She wiped her palms on her coat. “She was going to bring it to you the week she died. She told me the highway wasn’t an accident if she didn’t make that drive.”

Prescott had gone still by the door.

Lawson heard Blythe’s question again, the one about going first. He folded the page once, exactly on Genevieve’s circle.

“Yates sees this tonight,” he said. “Under my name, not the hospital’s. No copies. No calls from this floor.”

“And the necklace?” Elena asked.

“Stays with me until I know who else has seen it.” He looked at her soaked shoes, at the guards, at the dark window. “You stay inside the estate. If you run, I will ᴀssume you led them here. If you were sent, Prescott will know before morning.”

She nodded. Some of the fear left her face and a different kind took its place.

“She said you would sound like that,” Elena said. “She said if I got through the gate, I was to tell you the children can still be pulled back. Not with what they’ve been given. With what she hid, and with the name on the last page.”

He turned the report over. A name was there, written small, underlined twice. He knew it. It had eaten at his table. It had stood at Genevieve’s funeral with a hand on his shoulder.

Outside the room, a machine changed its pitch. Lawson was already moving toward his children, the page in his fist, the blue stone cold against his palm, and the ten days no longer the only clock in the building.