The Hospital Band on Maya’s Wrist

I staggered back until the counter caught me. The sudden clatter jolted Maya awake. She pushed herself upright on the cot, rubbing at her eyes while the blanket slipped from her shoulders.

My gaze returned to the infant. Then Thomas’s message came back to me, the one he had sent in the parking lot and that had set this standoff in motion.

Walk out the front doors and leave the girl. You can keep the baby.

Thomas Vance had just admitted he hated children and had no wish to bring up somebody else’s. So why offer me the baby he supposedly loved? Why would he hand over Sarah’s child without a fight?

The answer took shape, cold and impossible to ignore.

This baby wasn’t Sarah’s.

I turned to Maya. She stared at me, frightened by the change in my face. Her small features looked drained of color.

“Maya,” I said softly. My voice broke, and I had to force air through the tightness in my throat. “Look at me, sweetheart.”

She made a small, uncertain sound and drew her knees close to her body.

I pointed toward the infant on the examination table. My hand wouldn’t stay steady. “Maya, who does this baby belong to?”

Her eyes moved to the child, then fell to her own hands. A tear traced the bruising on her cheek.

“He’s Uncle Tom’s baby,” she murmured. Her voice sounded distant, as if she were trying to make herself disappear. “Mommy said Toby went away in the spring. She said he went to heaven.”

For a moment, the words seemed to have nowhere to go. They remained between us in the bright, clinical room.

Toby had gone to heaven in the spring.

My lungs stopped working. The lights above us blurred, and the room seemed to cant beneath my feet. I looked again at the infant: dark eyes, unmarked skin where Toby’s birthmark should have been.

This child wasn’t my son. My boy, the baby I had kissed goodbye on that freezing morning in February, was gone.

I lowered myself beside Maya’s cot, knees meeting the floor. My hands clutched the metal frame, shaking hard enough to make it tremble.

“What are you saying?” I asked. “What happened to Toby?”

Maya pulled away and raised the thick blanket to cover her mouth. Her gaze flicked toward the female Navy corpsman, who was speaking quietly into her radio.

“Mommy was sleeping,” Maya whispered. “She wouldn’t wake up. Toby kept crying in his crib. He felt hot, and I tried to give him his bottle, but he wouldn’t drink it.”

She swallowed. I stayed still and let her continue, though every word seemed to strike somewhere beneath my ribs.

“Then Uncle Tom came. He got mad at Mommy. He wrapped Toby in a blanket and carried him away. He didn’t bring him back.”

Maya’s voice thinned. “Mommy told me Toby was an angel now. She said I couldn’t tell you, because you’d be mad at me.”

A broken sound escaped me. I couldn’t have named it. It was not a word, or even a proper sob. It was what came out when the truth split through the discipline I’d spent years building.

The medical bay door swung open. Gunny Miller hurried inside, his sidearm drawn. He took in the room, then fixed on me beside Maya and the unfamiliar baby on the table.

“David,” he ordered, putting his weapon away as he came over. He gripped my shoulders. “Sit up. Tell me what happened.”

I looked at him, barely able to form the answer. “That isn’t Toby. That baby belongs to Thomas. Toby’s dead. They killed my son.”

Gunny’s expression went hard. He asked nothing more. Turning at once, he left the medical bay and headed back toward the interrogation room.

I got to my feet and followed him, my steps unsteady on the polished floor. The child on the table and Maya’s words stayed with me as I went.

By the time I reached the observation room, Gunny was inside with Thomas. He was standing over him, gripping the front of his expensive shirt and hauling him up from his seat. Thomas’s handcuffs knocked against the table.

“Where’s Toby?” Gunny demanded. “Where is Toby Miller?”

Thomas seemed to lose what little strength he had. His face went gray, and the confidence he’d shown earlier vanished. He began to breathe in quick, shallow pulls.

“I didn’t kill him!” he cried. Tears ran down his bruised face. “Sarah did it. It was her!”

I watched through the glass, my hands balled at my sides. The distance between us did nothing to quiet the rage or the grief rising in me.

Gunny pressed Thomas to answer. “Tell me what happened. Where is Toby?”

Thomas folded forward until his head rested on the metal tabletop. His voice came out muffled and broken.

“April,” he said. “It happened in April. Sarah left him in his crib for two days while she was with me.”

My breath left me. I had been deployed then, stationed at a forward base in the desert. I’d read Sarah’s letters and believed them when she wrote about Toby growing bigger.

Thomas lifted his face enough to keep speaking. “She told me she’d hired a nanny for the weekend. When we went back to the house on Elmwood Drive, the baby wasn’t responding. He had a terrible fever.”

The room around me seemed to narrow to Thomas’s words. I had been thousands of miles away, trusting that my son was safe at home.

“Toby was alone in his crib,” Thomas said. “He died there while you were deployed.”