Chapter 2 - The Ghost in the NurseryThe heavy oak door of the north nursery clicked shut behind me, sealing out the stifling atmosphere of the living room downstairs.
The room was bathed in the soft, amber glow of a night-light shaped like a sleeping bear. A pristine white crib stood against the far wall, draped in delicate lace. Standing beside it was a middle-aged woman in a crisp white medical uniform, her hands neatly folded over her apron.
She jumped slightly as I stepped into the light.
"Mr. Thorne," she murmured, bobbing her head in a nervous, rehearsed motion. "I... I wasn't expecting you upstairs. Mrs. Thorne said you were occupied with the arrangements."
I walked slowly past the rocking chair where Olivia had spent hours reading prenatal guides during my final week home. Every corner of this room still carried her scent—lavender, vanilla, and the faint, sweet trace of paper from her sketchbooks.
"What is your name?" I asked, my voice dropping into a gentle, measured tone that masked the storm raging inside my chest.
"Nurse Evelyn Miller, sir. Hired by Madam Thorne through a private agency yesterday."
Yesterday.
My wife had supposedly died three days ago according to my mother's initial text message, yet the private nurse had only been hired yesterday to care for a newborn who had allegedly lost his mother at birth. Who had been feeding my son for the first forty-eight hours? Where was he kept while they arranged a corpse in my living room?
"Is he sleeping?" I asked, stepping closer to the edge of the crib.
"Yes, Mr. Thorne. He's a very quiet baby. Hardly makes a sound."
I peered down through the wooden slats of the crib.
A tiny bundle of pale blue blankets lay nestled in the center of the mattress. I reached out, my fingers trembling slightly as I pulled back the edge of the blanket to reveal a baby's face.
My breath caught.
The infant was breathing softly, his tiny chest rising and falling in steady rhythms. He had a tuft of dark hair just like Olivia's, and a faint birthmark behind his left ear. But as I stared at him, a cold, sickening realization washed over me.
This baby wasn't a newborn.
A newborn's skin is mottled, red, bearing the unmistakable signs of recent delivery. This infant's skin was clear, smooth, and settled—easily three or four weeks old.
The timeline my mother had fed me—that Olivia had died during childbirth just days ago—was an absolute, undeniable fabrication.
"Nurse Miller," I said quietly, never taking my eyes off the sleeping child. "When was this baby born?"
The nurse hesitated, her hands clenching tightly against her apron. "I... I was told October twelfth, sir. Same day Mrs. Thorne passed."
"October twelfth," I repeated softly. Today was November fourth.
If this child was born weeks ago, where had Olivia been during those missing weeks? And whose baby was really sleeping in this crib? Or worse... what had happened to the real baby, and where was Olivia hiding before they dragged her lifeless body down into the living room to stage a tragedy?
Before the nurse could stammer out another rehearsed excuse, my phone buzzed silently in my pocket.
I pulled it out, angling the screen away from the nurse's line of sight. It was an encrypted push notification from my digital vault's automated file-recovery protocol.
The microSD card I had pulled from Olivia's clenched fingers downstairs had just been plugged into my remote secure server via my laptop downstairs—a fail-safe sync I had programmed months ago that automatically decrypted any media card linked to my vault the second it made contact with a trusted terminal.
The first file had finished decoding.
It was a video file, recorded on Olivia's phone just four days ago.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I looked up at Nurse Miller, whose eyes were darting nervously toward the door.
May you like
"Stay here," I instructed her, my voice carrying an edge of iron that made her shrink back. "If you leave this room before I return, I will personally ensure your nursing license is revoked across every state in the union."
Without waiting for her reply, I turned on my heel and strode out of the nursery, heading straight down the private hallway toward my locked home office.
