Chapter 1
Chapter 1 - Because It Happened Yesterday
I heard Ethan crying before I saw him.
It was the kind of cry that fills a whole house, and it was coming down the main hall of the Falcone estate, straight toward the nursery door where I was folding his little shirts.
Then Mr. Falcone walked into the foyer with the baby in his arms, and the cry changed.
It broke off into a cough, and then into a sound I will never get out of my head.
A wet, ragged pull for air that wasn't a cry at all.
I was moving before I decided to move.
Ethan saw me and threw both arms out, tipping his whole small body toward me, and Mr. Falcone looked up at me with his face gone white.
"What's happening?"
"Give him to me.
Now."
He handed his son across that two feet of air like he was handing over something already broken.
I kept Ethan's head and neck steady in one arm and checked his face.
His lips had a bluish tinge at the edges.
His chest was working too hard for the little air he was getting.
I had seen this exact picture twenty hours earlier, in that same house, with nobody else in the room.
So I did not waste one second on explaining.
"Call 911.
Now!"
Anthony had his phone out before I finished the sentence.
He was already giving the address, the gate code, the age of the child, in that flat, efficient voice of his.
Mr. Falcone pressed in close, so close I could feel him shaking.
I stayed with Ethan.
I kept him upright and safe, and I talked to him, nonsense words, my voice steady even while my eyes burned.
Then he gave one small, weak cry.
It was the best sound I had ever heard in that house.
His breathing evened out, ragged but real, and I looked down at him and felt the tears come and did not bother hiding them.
Mr. Falcone let out a breath that seemed to come from the bottom of him.
"How did you know?"
I looked up at him, and I told him the truth, because there was no other answer left in me.
"Because it happened yesterday."
His eyes went wide, and for a moment the most feared man in that house looked like someone had knocked all the air out of him too.
Sirens came up the long driveway within minutes.
The paramedics came through the front door, took one look at Ethan, and went to work with a calm that I envied.
They checked him over, wrapped the monitors around his small chest, and told us his color was good and his oxygen was holding.
Then they carried him out to the ambulance, and Mr. Falcone walked beside the gurney with his hand resting on the rail the whole way, like he was afraid the night would take his son back if he let go.
At the doors of the ambulance he stopped, and turned, and looked at me with something I had never seen on his face before.
It wasn't anger.
It was worse.
It was a man realizing how much he had not been told.
"You're riding with us," he said.
"And when my son is safe, you're going to tell me everything.
What you hid.
Why nobody in this house told me my own boy almost died."
"Mr. Falcone—"
"Everything, Nora.
Starting with yesterday."
May you like
He held the door of the ambulance open, and I got in, because there was nowhere else in the world I was going to be.
And because the truth was going to come out one way or another, and I would rather it came from me.
