CHAPTER TEN – THE MEMORY SHE BURIED
Emily's vision blurred.
The flashing emergency lights...
The smell of antiseptic...
The echo of alarms...
Everything felt hauntingly familiar.
"I've been here before," she whispered.
Richard turned toward her.
"What?"
Emily closed her eyes.
Fragments of a forgotten night rushed back.
Twenty-six years earlier...
She had been a nineteen-year-old volunteer at St. Gabriel Medical Center.
A massive electrical fire had forced doctors to evacuate newborn infants from the maternity ward.
One baby had stopped breathing.
Everyone else panicked.
Emily hadn't.
She grabbed the infant, performed CPR exactly as a nurse had once taught her, and refused to let go until he cried.
The room erupted in relief.
An older man stepped out of the shadows.
Silver hair.
Cold eyes.
Charles Hawthorne.
He had watched everything.
"You have remarkable instincts," he had told her.
Emily never saw him again.
Or so she believed.
Her eyes snapped open.
"He recognized me."
Richard frowned.
"What are you talking about?"
Emily looked at Liam.
"It wasn't the boys he wanted."
"It was me."
Charles had spent decades searching for the woman who unknowingly witnessed what happened inside the facility that night.
Not because she remembered...
But because he feared one day she would.
Suddenly, another memory surfaced.
She remembered seeing two newborn boys.
One wore an identification bracelet.
May you like
The other didn't.
Someone had quietly switched them.
