Chapter 3

Sophie's POV

At four in the morning, a rescue helicopter winched me up from the water. The baby in my arms had stopped breathing.

By the time the upriver rescue team reached the Riverside District, the rooftop of Building Three was completely submerged. Only a few inches of exhaust pipe still broke the surface.

The searchlight swept across it and found my hand first, fingers locked white around the metal pipe. Then it found my face, bloated and pale, completely still.

Against my chest, tied in place with the ruins of my rescue jacket, was a small bundle.

A rescue swimmer dropped down on a rope to free the knot. He found my fingers frozen solid. He had to force them apart twice before the wrappings came loose.

The moment the medic took the bundle, his arm stopped.

Too light. Like holding a roll of cold cotton.

"Move. Get the baby to trauma first."

"The mother's alive. Pull her up."

The helicopter blades tore through the rain. I was lifted onto the stretcher unconscious, my lips purple, water dripping from my clothes. But my right hand was clenched in a fist so tight no one could open it.

The medic cut my sleeve open and saw a ring of deep marks pressed into my wrist, the imprint of something worn there for a long time.

Now there was nothing there.

"Got it!" Another rescuer pulled something from the water: a cracked bracelet caked with mud.

The GPS light was still blinking. Faint. Stubborn.

He wiped it clean and plugged it into the team's terminal. My ID came up instantly, and the last recorded coordinates were locked to the rooftop of Building Three, Riverside District.

He scrolled down to the transmission log.

Every two seconds.

From the moment the dam broke, right up until the helicopter arrived. I had never stopped sending.

He checked the receiver log.

One line. Cold and clear:

Blocked.

The rescuer stared at it. His face changed.

He knew exactly what that meant. They all did.

This was deliberate.

He shoved the bracelet to the team recorder, his voice flat as ice."Photograph it. Log it. Seal it in an evidence bag and don't let anyone touch it."

The helicopter set down at the Memorial Hermann Hospital helipad.

I was rushed into trauma, blood pressure so low the monitors screamed the whole way.

In the room next to mine, they laid my baby on a table. The medics unwrapped him from his soaked bundle and worked on that tiny chest.

One compression.

Another.

Again.

That small body, one month old, did not move.

I tried to say something, but the nurses were already pushing me through a different door.

Ethan still didn't know any of this.

He didn't know I was lying in a trauma bay with my life hanging by a thread.

He didn't know that his son, the one who never got a name, had been covered with a white sheet.

And the bracelet he had clasped on my wrist was sitting in a clear evidence bag, its cracked screen still blinking its dim, bitter light.

Near dawn, the door to the neonatal trauma room opened slowly.

The doctor pulled off his mask. He looked at the chart in his hands and spoke in a voice too tired to soften it.

"Unidentified infant male. Approximately one month of age. Hypothermia from immersion. Non-responsive to resuscitation."

The nurse's eyes were red. She lowered her head and filled in the time of death.

In the room next door, I lay buried under tubes and wires, my face as white as the walls.

A nurse came in and told me everything.

The shock was too much. I lost consciousness.