He Sacrificed Our Son, But Won't Let Me Go novel · Chapter 6 of 32

Chapter 6: The Physician

Maura took the physician into the supply room and shut the door.

It was a closet with a sink, a shelf of bandages and one barred window that looked out on the alley.

He sat on an upturned box of saline and held his hat against his chest.

"Start with your name," she said.

"You know my name. I've known you since you were twenty-two."

"I want to hear it from you before you say anything else."

His mouth worked.

"Because after I tell you, you will not say it again with kindness," he said.

"Tell me."

He closed his eyes.

"Carlo called me at eleven that Friday night." He drew a breath. "He said the boys had been in a fire and one of them was gone."

Maura did not move.

"I drove to the morgue. He met me there with two men and a van."

"Which boy?" she said.

"He said yours."

"And did you see him?"

"No." The old man opened his eyes. "Nobody had brought anyone in. The tables were empty. Carlo said the fire was too hot to recover him. He said there would be nothing to bury, and a mother would have to bury something."

Her hands had gone cold.

"He told me what weight to make it," the physician whispered. "Forty pounds. A boy of five. He had it written on a card. A man at the docks filled the order."

"Filled it with what?"

"I wrote the certificate. I wrote the cause. I never saw a child."

She heard the tap drip once, twice.

"You let me bury a box you filled to a number," she said.

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