“Mommy needs me.”
“We’re going to help Mommy.”
“You promise?”
That word again.
Promise.
“Yes.”
Thomas approached with paramedics.
Inside, the house was silent.
Baby bottles sat near the sink.
Laundry covered a chair.
A pot remained on the stove.
Then they found Lucy’s mother.
Her name was Emily Harper.
She was thirty-one.
And she was alive.
Barely.
She was unconscious in the bedroom, severely ill following the twins’ recent birth and desperately in need of emergency medical treatment.
Paramedics moved immediately.
Thomas returned outside.
Lucy watched from the patrol car as the stretcher emerged.
“Mommy!”
She tried opening the door.
An officer gently stopped her.
“She’s going to the hospital.”
“Is she awake?”
“Not yet.”
Lucy began crying.
“But you’ll wake her?”
The officer couldn’t promise that.
So he said something safer.
“The doctors are going to try very hard.”
Lucy nodded.
Then she asked:
