27. Lo
— ? —
Lo
The hospital room is quiet at three in the morning.
Hattie’s asleep in the bassinet beside my bed, making the soft snuffling sounds of a newborn who hasn’t quite figured out breathing yet. The monitors beep their steady rhythm. The hallway outside is hushed, the silence of a building that never fully sleeps but sometimes pretends to.
I should be sleeping too. The doctor said rest, the nurses said rest, Jesse said rest before he went to find coffee because the machine on this floor is broken and he’s been awake for almost twenty hours and he’s running on fumes.
But I can’t sleep.
Every time I close my eyes, I see Brandi’s face. The kitchen. The knife on the table. The way she looked at me like I was an obstacle to be removed.
She’s still out there.
Peter updated us two hours ago. The creek bed led to a county road; she had a car waiting.
They’ve got her plate now, from the vehicle she used to reach the creek access.
And units watching the main routes out of the county.
But Brandi’s been evading them for months. She’s not stupid, whatever else she is.
There’s a deputy stationed at the nurses’ station down the hall. Peter arranged it after the attack, part of the security upgrade. Staff have been told to verify anyone entering the maternity ward.
The door opens.
I tense, but it’s just a nurse, scrubs, badge, the tired expression of someone in the middle of a long shift. She’s carrying a clipboard, moving efficiently toward my bed.
“How are we doing, Mrs. Cooper? Need anything for pain?”
“I’m fine.”
“Baby sleeping?”
“For now.”
The nurse nods, makes a note on her clipboard. She’s average height, dark hair pulled back, forgettable in the way of hospital staff who blend into the background. She moves toward the bassinet.
“Just going to check her vitals,” she says.
Something’s wrong.
I don’t know what triggers it: maybe the way she moves, too purposeful. Maybe the way her badge is clipped slightly crooked. Maybe just the instinct of a mother who’s been awake too long and afraid too much.
Then she turns, and I see her eyes, and I know.
Brandi.
She’s in scrubs that don’t quite fit. A badge that must have been stolen. The deputy at the nurses’ station checks people coming onto the floor, but internal staff moving between rooms wouldn’t trigger the same scrutiny.
She’s ten feet from my daughter’s bassinet, and Jesse’s getting coffee, and I’m lying in a hospital bed with stitches and blood loss and a body that won’t obey me.
“You,” I say.
“Hello again, Lo.” Her voice is calm. Friendly, even. Like we’re old acquaintances running into each other at the grocery store. “I had to see the baby. Jesse’s baby. Our baby, really, once you’re out of the picture.”
“There’s a deputy at the nurses’ station.”
“There’s a deputy watching the ward entrance. But I didn’t come through the entrance.” She smiles. “I came through the staff corridor. Badge got me past the supply room door. People see scrubs and a badge, they don’t ask questions about which direction you’re walking.”
I reach for the call button. My fingers find it beneath the blanket, press it quietly, hold it down. Brandi doesn’t notice. She’s focused on the bassinet, taking another step toward it.
“The call button won’t save you,” she says. “By the time anyone gets here, we’ll be having our conversation.”
My heart is hammering. The monitors are beeping faster now, reflecting my panic, and somewhere a nurse will notice but somewhere might not be soon enough.
“She needs a diaper change,” I say.
Brandi pauses. “What?”
“The baby. She’s wet. I can smell it from here.” I force my voice to stay calm. Conversational. “If you’re going to take her, you should at least change her first. Jesse hates when her clothes get soiled. He’s very particular about that.”
It’s a lie. Hattie was changed an hour ago. But Brandi doesn’t know that, and I need her attention on me, not on the bassinet.
“I know how to take care of a baby,” Brandi says. “I’ve been preparing for this for years.”
“Have you? What’s her feeding schedule?”
“What?”
“Her feeding schedule. She eats every two hours. Specific formula - the regular kind gives her gas. Jesse researched it extensively.” More lies. Hattie’s been breastfeeding, when she’s not too sleepy to latch. “He’ll be so disappointed if you don’t do it right.”
Brandi’s eyes narrow. “You’re stalling.”
“I’m being helpful. You want Jesse to love you, don’t you? You need to know these things.”
“Jesse already loves me.”
“Then you should know his daughter’s routine. He’ll expect it.”
She hesitates. I can see her calculating, the desire to grab the baby and run warring with the need to prove she’s worthy, that she’s prepared, that she’s the mother Hattie deserves.
I use the pause to move.
Not toward her. I can’t fight, not like this, not with my body held together by stitches and willpower. But I shift in the bed, put myself between Brandi and the bassinet as much as I can. Create a barrier. Make her go through me if she wants to get to my daughter.
“You’re pathetic,” Brandi says. “Look at you. You can barely sit up. What do you think you’re going to do?”
“Whatever I have to.”
“He doesn’t want you. He never wanted you. You were convenient, that’s all. Familiar. A placeholder until he found someone who actually understood him.”
“He came back for me.”
“Because you trapped him! The pregnancy, the sob story, playing the victim-”
“I didn’t play anything. I lived it. Every day you were sending those letters, I was living with the consequences of your obsession.”
“Obsession.” She laughs, but it’s brittle. “That’s what people call love when they don’t understand it. I love him. I’ve loved him since the moment I saw him. And you-”
The door opens.
A real nurse (the call light brought her) takes one look at the scene. Older, sharper, badge firmly attached. Me sitting up in bed, Brandi frozen mid-rant, the tension crackling like electricity.
Her hand goes straight to her radio. “Security to room 412. Code gray. Intruder in patient room.”
Brandi runs.
Not for the bassinet, for the door, shoving past the nurse before either of us can stop her, out into the corridor in her stolen scrubs. I hear her hit the hallway at a dead sprint, a cart going over, the deputy from the nurses’ station shouting into his radio.
Jesse fills the doorway a second later, coffee down the front of his shirt, brain still catching up to the alarm. “What-”
“She was here.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Jesse, she was right here.”
He looks at me, looks at Hattie still in the bassinet, and the whole thing lands on his face at once. He turns like he’s going after her.
“Don’t. Stay. Please, just stay.”
He stays. He goes to the window instead, and I follow the line of his body, and from four floors up we can see the lot laid out flat and orange under the sodium lights.
She doesn’t make the road.
The deputy from our floor must have radioed ahead, because two more officers are already converging from the parking structure.
Brandi bursts out the side exit straight into them.
A scramble on the asphalt. A flash of pale scrubs.
And then they’ve got her face-down over the hood of a cruiser, and even through the glass, four stories up, I can hear her.
“HE’S MINE.” It tears up through the night and the window and my chest. “HE’S MINE, HE’S MINE, HE’S-”
And then, pinned and cuffed and out of road, she screams the thing nobody outside a sealed investigation was ever supposed to say.
“IF SLOANE HAD TOLD ME WHERE THIS BITCH WAS SOONER YOU’D NEVER HAVE SAVED HER!”
It carries across the whole lot. The deputies hear it. The knot of smokers by the entrance hear it. Bree, who came the second Jesse called and never left the lobby, hears it. Sloane’s name, screamed into a parking lot under the lights, in front of every soul out there.
Jesse goes very still at the window. I watch him land on it the same way I already have.
Jesse crosses to my bed. His hands are shaking. His face is a mask of barely contained horror.
“Are you okay? Did she touch you? The baby-”
“We’re fine.” I reach for Hattie’s bassinet, pull it closer, check her with my own eyes. Still sleeping. Still perfect. Completely oblivious to the nightmare that just unfolded around her. “She didn’t get to her. I stalled her.”
“How?”
“Told her the baby needed a diaper change. Made up feeding schedules. Kept her talking.”
He laughs. It’s not a happy sound, more shock than amusement, but it’s something.
“You’re incredible,” he says.
“I’m exhausted and terrified and I want to hold my daughter.”
“Let me help.”
He lifts Hattie from the bassinet, careful, gentle, the movements of a man who’s been reading parenting books for months, and places her in my arms. She stirs, makes a small sound of protest, then settles against my chest.
I hold her. I breathe.
Jesse sits on the edge of the bed, one arm around me, the other hand resting on Hattie’s back. We stay like that, the three of us, while the chaos continues in the hallway.
“Sloane,” I say finally.
“I know.”
“We knew it after the clinic. Now a whole parking lot heard it.”
“I know.”
“The threats, the manipulation, the hiding - it was all connected.”
“I know.” His voice is hard. Cold. “And she’s going to pay for it.”
Peter appears in the doorway. He looks tired and grim, but there’s something like satisfaction in his expression.
“Got her,” he says. “She’s in custody. Already talking - can’t shut her up, actually. Keeps saying Sloane promised her things, Sloane gave her information, Sloane was supposed to help her get to Jesse.”
“Is that enough to arrest Sloane?” I ask.
“It’s a start. Testimony of an accomplice, connection to the threatening letters, possible conspiracy charges.
” Peter pulls out his phone. “Pruitt and I have been coordinating since March. He’s been building a case on his end, but they needed someone on the inside to flip. Brandi just handed them that.”
“Do it,” Jesse says. “Whatever it takes. I want her held accountable.”
Peter nods and steps into the hall, phone already at his ear. Through the door I catch the front of it: “Pruitt - it’s Peter. She’s talking. You’re going to want to hear this.”