Chapter 1
A 4-year-old girl was crying at the bottom of an open dirt pit when her mother found her.
Mia’s yellow dress was covered in dust, and her tiny hands were pressed against the dirt wall.
“Mommy… she said you’d never find me.”
Rachel’s blood ran cold.
She dropped to her knees and pulled her daughter up.
That was when her sister-in-law, Claire, came running from behind the shed.
“It was an accident,” Claire said quickly. “She wandered over here by herself.”
Mia immediately shook her head.
“She told me to stay down there.”
Rachel stared at Claire.
Then—
Something red slipped from Mia’s fist.
A plastic hospital bracelet.
Claire’s face went completely pale.
“Where did you get that?”
Rachel picked it up.
Her husband’s name was printed across the front.
But the admission date was from two weeks earlier.
He had told Rachel he’d been away on a business trip that entire week.
On the back of the bracelet, someone had written a room number by hand.
Mia pointed toward Claire.
“She dropped it when she put me down there.”
Claire suddenly stepped backward.
“Rachel, you don’t understand.”
Then Mia whispered:
“She said Daddy was sleeping somewhere you can’t visit.”
Rachel tightened her grip around the bracelet.
May you like
And Claire stopped trying to explain.
Because whatever had happened at that hospital was clearly the reason Mia had been put somewhere she wasn’t supposed to climb out of.
