The silence in the nursery was so thick it felt like I was drowning in it. My vision blurred as I stared at the grainy image on my phone—the small, pale boy in the basement, a ghost made of flesh and bone, calling for a mother he had never been allowed to know.
“Valerie, put the phone down,” Spencer said, his voice dropping an octave into a register of pure, cold command. “You’re having an episode. You’ve been sleepwalking again. Eleanor, call the guards.”
“Don’t you dare,” I whispered, my voice shaking so violently I could barely form the words. I looked at the man I had shared a bed with for seven years. I looked at the mother-in-law who had held my hand during my ‘miscarriage’ four years ago. “The basement, Spencer. Who is in the basement?”
Eleanor stepped forward, her silk robe billowing like a shroud. “There is no one in the basement, Valerie. You’ve been under a lot of stress. The hormones after Matthew’s birth… the post-partum psychosis we discussed…”
“I saw him!” I screamed, the sound tearing from my throat. “I saw his face! He has Spencer’s eyes! He has my father’s chin!”
The doctor in the white lab coat—Dr. Aristhone, a man I now recognized from the elite private surgical wing of Montgomery General—shuffled his feet. “Eleanor, we need to move. If she’s alerted the security feed, the digital footprint is already expanding.”
