“Mom, where are you,” he asked, panic already in his voice.
“I’m at the hospital,” I said slowly. “Ethan was hurt.”
“What do you mean hurt,” he demanded.
“There’s a bruise on his stomach, and the doctor says someone squeezed him hard enough to cause internal bleeding,” I explained.
“That’s impossible,” he said immediately.
“I know, but someone did,” I replied.
Then Caroline took the phone, her voice shaking as she said something that changed everything.
“He already had that bruise yesterday.”
My breath caught as I asked, “You saw it yesterday and didn’t go to the hospital.”
“We thought it was just a mark,” she said weakly.
I asked who else had been with Ethan, and after a long hesitation, Adrian admitted they had hired a part time nanny two weeks earlier.
When the doctor returned with another scan, he pointed out that the marks on Ethan’s abdomen were too small to belong to an adult hand.
“These look like they could be from a child,” he said.
A child.
The idea shifted everything in a way I could barely process.
When Adrian and Caroline arrived, they were frantic, and we barely had time to speak before a nurse informed us that the nanny had arrived at the hospital with a little girl.