“I’m coming,” he said, and when the girl started to shake her head as if she feared she’d be left behind, he added, “And she’s coming with us.”
Maisie And Rowan
In the back of the ambulance, the girl sat close enough to Nolan that their shoulders nearly touched, her gaze locked on the baby as if watching could keep his breath going.
Nolan leaned slightly toward her so she didn’t have to fight the roar of the road and the wail of the siren.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Maisie,” she whispered. “Maisie Kincaid.”
“And your brother?”
Her lower lip trembled.
“Rowan. He’s Rowan. I’ve been taking care of him since he got here.”
The way she said it, like it had always been her job, like she had never been asked if she wanted it, made Nolan’s stomach twist.
“Maisie,” he said gently, “where is your mom?”
Her eyes dropped to her hands, and her fingers worried at each other like knots.
“She can’t know I left,” Maisie said. “She gets confused. Sometimes she forgets things, and sometimes she forgets me, and if she gets scared she hides, and then there’s a man who brings food sometimes, and he said I’m not supposed to talk about him, because it’s a secret.”
Nolan felt a chill crawl up his spine.
“What man?” he asked, careful, slow.
But the ambulance was already pulling into the emergency bay, doors thrown open, and Rowan was rushed inside under bright hospital lights that made Maisie squint like someone who hadn’t been under clean fluorescent glow in a long time.
Bright Lights And Quiet Questions
The pediatric emergency unit at Cedar Hollow Regional Medical Center hummed with urgency, nurses moving fast, monitors chiming, and a doctor with kind eyes and hair pinned back in a neat twist stepped forward as the team wheeled Rowan through swinging doors.
Dr. Tessa Markham glanced at the baby and her expression sharpened into controlled focus.
“How long has he been like this?” she asked.
Maisie’s voice barely carried.
“He got quiet this morning. I tried to wake him up, but he didn’t open his eyes.”
Dr. Markham’s jaw tightened.
“We’re going to stabilize him immediately,” she said, then looked at Nolan. “Officer, I need room to work.”
Nolan nodded, then guided Maisie to a waiting chair, keeping one hand lightly on her shoulder so she knew she hadn’t been abandoned.
When the doors swung shut, Maisie stared at them as if her whole world sat behind that strip of plastic and metal.
After a few minutes of silence, Nolan pulled out his notebook, not because he wanted to interrogate a child, but because the only way to protect her was to understand what she’d been living inside.
“Maisie,” he said softly, “I’m going to ask some questions, and you can answer only what you can, okay? You’re not in trouble. I just need to make sure you and Rowan are safe.”
She nodded, small and stiff.
“Tell me about the man who brings food,” Nolan said.
Her face went pale.
“I don’t know his name,” she admitted. “Mom called him ‘the helper.’ He comes when it’s dark, and he never comes inside, he just leaves bags on the porch, and sometimes he sits in his car down the road, like he’s watching.”
The House That Didn’t Feel Lived In
By the time Nolan drove out toward the address Maisie finally whispered, the roads were empty, the town lights fading behind him, fields stretching into blackness, and the quiet made everything feel louder, from the tires on gravel to the wind rattling dried weeds along the ditch.
With him was Sheriff Rhea Langford, who didn’t waste words, because sheriffs learn early that chatter doesn’t make uncertainty smaller.
The house sat back from the road, half-swallowed by tall grass, with paint peeling in strips and a porch that sagged like it was tired of carrying anyone’s weight.
Sheriff Langford swept a flashlight beam across the dirt drive.
Fresh tire tracks.
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