Substitute Luna, Runaway With His Quadruplets novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Evergreen Hollow

Evergreen Hollow had forty beds, one door and no phones.

It stood at the end of the old logging road, a long grey building with bars on the second-floor windows and a pine forest pressed up against the back wall.

They put me in Room 9.

When they brought me in, a man in green scrubs brought a paper cup of pills and a paper cup of tea.

"For your nerves," he said. "Drink up."

I drank the tea.

I held the pills under my tongue until he left, and spat them into my palm.

I had four reasons not to take a single thing in that building.

That night, the night of the wedding, the nurse came on shift at ten.

She was a heavy, tired woman in her fifties with a lanyard that said NIGHT STAFF and a cardigan buttoned wrong.

She checked my pulse and wrote it down and didn't say a word.

When she reached the door she stopped with her hand on the frame.

"The tea they bring you at nine," she said, keeping her voice low. "Pour it in the plant."

I looked at her.

"There's a plant?"

She nodded at the dead fern on my windowsill.

"Doesn't matter if it dies. It's already dying."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I've worked here eleven years. I've seen a lot of Silver Claw families bring in a daughter for grief." She straightened her cardigan. "I've never seen one cry for four babies before they showed up on the chart."

The door closed behind her.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time with my hand on my stomach.

Then I got into the narrow bed and lay on my back.

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