Chapter 2
"Absolutely not." Marissa's voice cracked across the room like a dropped plate. "You are not cutting into a cast that a licensed physician just applied. Do you understand the liability — "
"I'm not cutting into it." Evelyn held the cutter loosely, unthreatening, the way she used to hold it in front of screaming toddlers who needed to see it wasn't a knife. "I'm asking his father's permission to check the padding along the seam. That's it. If there's nothing there, it goes right back together and I'll apologize to everyone in this room, including the drywall."
Daniel looked between his wife and his son. It was, Evelyn thought, the first time all afternoon he'd actually looked at Noah instead of at the situation Noah was causing.
"Daddy," Noah whispered. "Please."
Something in Daniel's face gave. "Do it," he said. "Just — the seam. Nothing crazy."
Marissa's hand shot toward Evelyn's wrist. "This is not your — "
Evelyn stepped back, calm, out of reach, and it was that small, controlled movement — not a raised voice, not a scene — that made a passing nurse pause in the doorway and quietly not leave.
"Noah," Evelyn said, kneeling by the bed, "I'm going to run this along the padding at your wrist. It won't hurt. It's not the loud one. Tell me the second anything feels different, okay?"
He nodded, teeth gritted, and held his arm out like a soldier offering a wound for inspection.
The cutter hummed low and steady. Evelyn worked the blade along the pre-scored seam the technician had left for exactly this kind of adjustment, peeling back a two-inch strip of fiberglass near the wrist. Underneath, the cotton padding was standard, white, unremarkable — until it wasn't. A thin line of it, no wider than a shoelace, was stained a deep, wrong yellow-brown, and it was here, at the inside of the wrist where the skin was thinnest, that something moved.
Not fabric settling. Not static in synthetic fiber.
Movement.
Noah made a sound low in his throat and turned his face away. Daniel went white. The nurse in the doorway said something into her radio that ended the low murmur of the room entirely.
Evelyn didn't flinch, because she had trained herself, years ago, not to flinch in front of a frightened child no matter what she found. She peeled the strip back another inch, and there, nestled against skin that was already inflamed and weeping at the edges, was a wound that had never been properly cleaned before the cast went on — and inside it, several small, pale shapes that had no business existing anywhere near a six-year-old's arm.
"Get Dr. Reyes," the nurse said into her radio, already moving. "Get her now."
Marissa's face had gone the color of the wall behind her. "That's — that's not possible, the orthopedist checked him before we — "
"Before you left the exam room," Evelyn said quietly, not looking up from Noah, whose hand she now held with two fingers, steady and slow. "You told the nurse you needed to take a call. You were gone for six minutes. The orthopedist came back in after you did."
It wasn't an accusation. It was a fact Evelyn had clocked without meaning to, the way she clocked everything — vitals, timelines, the space between what people said and what they did. But Marissa heard it as exactly what it was.
"I don't have to explain a phone call to the babysitter," she said, too fast, too loud for a hospital room.
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"No," Evelyn agreed. "You'll explain it to them."
She tilted her head toward the doorway, where Dr. Reyes had just arrived with two more staff behind her, and where, a few steps further back, a hospital security guard had quietly begun writing something down.
