The World Never Ended novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Vial

The nurse lived in a yellow house with a plastic duck on the porch.

I stood at her door at seven in the morning with Shane behind me and the detective's card in my pocket.

She opened it in a bathrobe, with a mug in her hand.

She was the woman who had held my hand through three births.

She had counted my fingers when I was afraid, and she had put a vial in my palm on the worst day of my life.

The mug slipped, and it broke on the porch boards.

"I knew you'd come," she said.

"Let me in."

She let me in.

The kitchen was small and clean, and there was a child's drawing on the fridge.

She sat down at the table and put both hands flat on it.

"Say it," I said. "All of it, from the start."

"He hired me in the first month."

"Who?"

"Mr. Delamater. He said it was a research program, and you were ill, and I was to keep you comfortable."

"You lived there?"

"Four days a week."

"You watched me scream."

"I watched you scream," she said. "I told myself it was the medicine."

"For five years."

"Yes."

I did not shout.

I had no more shouting left in me for people who had handed me bread.

"Tell me about the vial."

She closed her eyes.

"The first year he gave me a box with two bottles," she said.

"He said, 'For when she asks to stop.'"

"He said I was to give it to you the moment you asked."

"And I asked?"

"The week of the third birth. You asked me whether there was a way to stop the stones."

"I remember."

"I told him you had asked. He said, 'Good. Wait for Wednesday.'"

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