Chapter 3: The Woman on the Phone
I sat there with the phone still pressed against my ear long after the line went d*ad.
Camille was watching me.
"Who was that?"
"I don't know."
"What did they say?"
I looked at her.
Then at the door where they had taken Luke.
Then at Eli, still holding my hand on the edge of the bed.
"They said to stop talking to the police."
Camille's jaw tightened.
She stepped into the hallway and said something to the officer posted outside my room.
He came in immediately.
"Ma'am, I need you to tell me exactly what was said on that call."
"A woman.
She said Luke didn't act alone.
She said if I want June back safely, I need to stop cooperating."
He wrote it down without blinking.
"Did you recognize the voice?"
"No."
"Any accent?
Background noise?"
I closed my eyes and tried to pull it back.
The voice had been smooth.
Controlled.
Not panicked.
Not angry.
The kind of voice that had rehearsed what it was going to say.
"She sounded like she'd made that call before."
He nodded and stepped back into the hallway.
Eli tugged my sleeve.
"Is June going to be okay?"
"Yes," I said.
I didn't know if that was true.
But he was six, and he had already done more to protect his sister than any adult in that building except Camille.
A second officer appeared in the doorway.
Younger.
He looked at me with the careful expression of someone about to say something he didn't want to say.
"Mrs.
Hartley.
We need to ask you about a name.
Does the name Renata mean anything to you?"
The air in the room changed.
It did mean something.
It meant something I had buried eighteen months ago and told myself was finished.
Renata was Luke's ex-wife.
Eli's mother.
She had signed away parental rights fourteen months before I married Luke.
The court documents were in our filing cabinet at home.
Luke had shown them to me himself.
He had cried when he talked about it.
Said she had chosen her addiction over their son.
Said Eli was better off.
Said it was the hardest thing he had ever watched happen.
I had believed every word.
"Why are you asking about Renata?"
The officer looked at his notepad.
"The unknown number that called your phone.
We ran it.
It's registered to a prepaid carrier, but we were able to pull the account creation address." He paused.
"It matches the last known address of a Renata Voss."
The room tilted.
Eli was very still beside me.
"Eli." I kept my voice level.
"Did you know your mom was near the hospital today?"
He didn't answer right away.
He looked down at the blanket across my legs and picked at a loose thread.
"She called Dad last week," he said quietly.
"I heard them.
He told her it was all arranged.
That everything was going to go the way she wanted."
"What did she want, sweetheart?"
He looked up at me.
His eyes were too old for his face.
May you like
"She wanted the baby.
She said if she couldn't have me back, she wanted the new one instead."
