Chapter 6: Renata
They found June eighteen minutes later.
Okafor told me himself.
He came to the doorway, and before he said a word, I read it in the way he walked — not rushed, not grim.
"She's safe," he said.
"Officers are with her now.
She'll be back in this room within the hour."
Eli made a sound I had never heard from him before.
Something between a sob and a laugh.
He pressed his face into my shoulder and stayed there.
I held him with one arm and stared at the ceiling and did not cry.
Not yet.
Renata turned out to be a woman named Renata Sousa — a former hospital administrator who had worked with Luke on the security installation.
She had taken June to an apartment twelve minutes from the hospital.
When police arrived, she was sitting in a rocking chair with June wrapped against her chest, singing something low and wordless.
She didn't resist.
She handed June over immediately.
"I thought I was helping," she told the officers.
"Luke said the baby was in danger.
I believed him."
Camille brought June back to me herself.
She set her in my arms without ceremony, without announcement, just placed her there and stepped back.
June was asleep.
Her face was the face I had been given photographs of — the ultrasound profile, the curve of the nose, the particular way her mouth rested.
She was exactly who she was supposed to be.
I looked at her for a long time without speaking.
Then I said, to no one in particular: "She doesn't have a birthmark."
"No," Camille said softly.
"She doesn't."
Eli leaned over to look.
He studied June's face with the focused seriousness he applied to everything.
"She looks like you," he said.
"Does she?"
"Around the eyes."
I looked at him — this six-year-old boy who had screamed in a hospital hallway because something was wrong and he knew it and he would not stop saying so until someone listened.
"Eli," I said.
"Thank you."
He shrugged one shoulder, the way he always did when he didn't know what to do with something that mattered.
"I just told the truth," he said.
Outside in the hallway, I could hear Luke's voice — lower now, slower, the voice of someone answering questions they cannot avoid.
A woman's voice I didn't recognize responded.
A lawyer, maybe.
Or another officer.
I didn't try to hear what he was saying.
I looked down at June.
She stirred once, made a small sound, and settled.
The door to Room 14 was still taped off at the end of the corridor.
Dara Wills had been moved to another room.
I didn't know yet what she had been told, or what she knew, or how much of this she understood.
But I knew I needed to find out.
May you like
Because if what Luke had said about Marcus Hale was true, then June being back in my arms was not the end of anything.
It was the beginning of a different problem entirely.
