“Where have they taken my baby?” I ask weakly, the words tired and paltry, my mouth like cotton. I can no longer scream. I pull dispiritedly on the handcuffs, trying to free myself from the bed.

“They’re for your own safety,” the woman says as she moves closer and sits in a chair beside the bed, an armchair she pulls close, skidding it across the tile floor as she says to me, “You’re in good hands, Heidi. You are safe. The baby is safe,” and I don’t know if it’s the compassion in her voice, or my overwhelming fatigue and despair, but I begin to weep. She snatches two, and then three, tissues from a dispenser on the bedside table and presses them to my face, for I cannot reach with my own hands. I pull away at first, away from this stranger’s touch, but find myself leaning into it then, into the warmth of her hands, the softness of the tissue.

She tells me her name, a name I instantly forget, save for the title that precedes it. Doctor. And yet she doesn’t look like a doctor at all, for there is no lab coat, no stethoscope. No balding head.

“We just want to make you feel better, that’s all,” she says, her voice pleasant and accommodating, as she runs that tissue across my cheek and wipes the tears from my eyes. Her hands, they smell of honey and coriander, reminding me of my mother’s cooking. My mind drifts back to my childhood home, the chunky farm table around which the four of us sat: my mother, my father, my brother and me. But my thoughts get stuck on my father, my father who is dead. I see the casket being lowered into the ground, lavender roses in the palm of my hand, my mother beside me, ever stoic, waiting for me to disintegrate into a million pieces in that graveyard, the one saturated by rain. Or wait—I wonder—was it the other way around? Was I the one who watched my mother, waiting for her to disintegrate?

I long to reach out and hold his wedding band, my father’s wedding band, in the palm of my hand, to wrap my fingers around the golden chain, but I’m affixed to the bed and cannot budge.

“Where is my baby?” I ask again, but she only says that she is safe.

She tells me without my asking that she has kids, too. Three of them. Two boys and a daughter named Maggie, only three months old, and it’s only then that I notice the baby weight on the woman’s otherwise slender frame, baby weight that has yet to fade. It’s this, the mention of her own children, that makes it easier to talk, easier to reveal the secrets I’ve held inside for so long.

Ruby, Juliet, Ruby, Juliet, and I remember then, that famous Rubin’s vase.

And so we talk about the sleepless nights and the fatigue. I tell her that Juliet has yet to sleep through the night, though my thoughts are heavy and opaque, words trapped in the sky on a cloudy day. I explain how she’s been ill—a urinary tract infection, I say—making it all the more difficult, to console a child who’s in pain. And the kind woman nods her head and agrees, and she tells me of her Maggie, born with a congenital heart disease, forced to undergo surgery just days after she left her mother’s womb. And I know then that this doctor, she understands. She understands what I’m saying.

And then she asks about Willow, not in the way the other woman did, but kinder, more gentle. She asks when she left, and why. “Why did she leave?” she asks, and so I tell her. I tell her about my father’s wedding band and the golden chain. About discovering the filigree bird hook with its distressed red finish completely bare, though I knew that I’d hung the chain there.

But no, I think, yanking again on hands that are bound to the bed in handcuffs, trying hard to peer down and prove to myself that the chain is there, around my neck as it should be. I ask the woman for it, for my father’s wedding band on the golden chain, but she peers beneath the neckline of a hospital gown and tells me there is no chain, no wedding band there.

And it’s then that my mind replays a scene, obscured somehow, by fog. Like a movie I’d seen in the past, the character’s names and title of the film long gone, but snippets of the movie left here and there in the recesses of my memory. Quotations, love scenes, a passionate kiss.

But in this scene, I offer medication to Zoe on the palm of my hand, two oblong white pills, and then I watch from the edge of a bed as she thrusts the pills into her mouth without a glance. I watch as she swallows, then, with a long swig of water. And then I return to the bathroom to replace a prescription pill bottle into an open medicine cabinet, the word Ambien staring me straight in the eye, beside pain relievers, beside antihistamines. And then I quietly close the door.

“Why didn’t you report her to the police?” the woman asks when I tell her about the wedding ring. I shrug my shoulders, on the verge of tears, and say that I don’t know. I don’t know why I didn’t call the police.

But I do know, don’t I?

And then there I am again, closing the door to the medicine cabinet and watching Zoe, anesthetized by my Ambien and not an antihistamine at all, drift off to sleep so that she won’t be awoken in the night. And I recall the words, my words running that night through my mind: there’s no telling what the night will bring.

I see myself remove the golden chain from around my neck and begin to hang it on the filigree bird, but then I don’t. I stop just short and conceal it, instead, in the palm of my hand, kissing Zoe on the forehead in the adjoining master bedroom before I leave the room.

And I step into the living room to find Willow in a chair, my Juliet sound asleep on the floor. I set to cleaning the remains of dinner, and in my visions, in this foggy memory—or maybe not a memory at all, but a daydream, a fantasy—as I discard leftover spaghetti into a plastic garbage bag, I watch from a distance as the golden wedding chain and band tumbles from my hand and into the garbage bag, comingling with hardening noodles and bloodred spaghetti sauce, and then I hoist the plastic bag out into the hall and down the garbage chute.

But no, I think, shaking my head. That can’t be. This is not true.

Willow took my father’s ring. She killed that man and then she took my father’s wedding ring. She is a murderer, a thief.

“Is there more?” the woman asks of me as she watches me shake my head from side to side like the bob of a grandfather clock. “Do you have any idea where Willow might be?”

It can’t be. Willow took that ring, I remember then and there, the way I sat on the edge of the bathtub, water running so that Zoe—sick with a cold, or maybe allergies—would not hear me cry. The way I looked up and discovered the hook completely bare, the way I tried in vain to call Chris for advice, but he was too busy with Cassidy Knudsen to answer my call.

I no longer know what’s fact and what’s fiction. Fantasy or reality. I tell her that no, I don’t know where Willow is. I bark the words, suddenly furious and longing for my father, for my father to stroke my head and tell me that everything will be okay.

It’s all coming at me quickly now, images of Willow, of Ruby, of Zoe, of Juliet. Images of blood and bodies and babies, unborn fetuses being removed from my womb.

But that kind woman who’s name I don’t know, who’s name I can’t remember, it’s then that she does stroke a hand over my head as my father would do; she says that everything will be all right, and I want to ask, “Daddy?”

But I know what she would say, how she would look at me if I called her by my father’s name.

“We’ll figure it all out,” she promises, and I find myself leaning into the mollifying words, finding the words themselves, the conciliatory tone of voice to be exhausting, as I close my eyes and let them lull me back to sleep.

* * *

By the time Chris arrives, it’s dark outside, the world on the other side of the single window now black.