Page 11 of The Delivery

Unease pulses to life inside Rebecca’s stomach.

“That was fast,” she says.

Shadows from the pine branches play across Mark’s face. “Too late to turn back now.”

The smile he cracks looks more nervous than amused.

Chapter 8

Two Months After Delivery

Maddy is crying in her room, sensory overload from the leaf blower and power mower roaring next door. The city has issued a ban on gas-powered landscaping tools, but Jackson and his gardeners don’t care and Rebecca can’t be bothered to confront him with everything else she has going on. At least that’s what she is telling herself rather than admitting that she is scared of him and wants to avoid conflict. For the past half hour she’s been running back and forth between Maddy and the laundry, and now she hears the teakettle she forgot about starting to scream; she’d promised Maddy Nervous Tummy Tea to calm her down.

Basket of whites on her hip, Rebecca races down the hall past the open nursery door. She is two steps from the kitchen when she registers what she observed.

The laundry basket hits the floor.

The teakettle pierces the air, vibrates the house. She hears a thumping from Maddy’s room and prays she is not banging her head against the wall again.

For a moment she cannot move. The teakettle shrieks along with Maddy, but Rebecca remains frozen there a few strides past the nursery.

She eases back a step.

Another.

Peers inside.

Sure enough, the sensor light above the N0RM LLC laser etching has gone from red to green.

Chapter 9

Mark and Rebecca stand somberly over the rectangular prism. Aside from a ceramic moon night-light, the glow of the touch screen, and the green sensor dot, the nursery is dark. Next door Jackson is having a party, his stereo blaring so loud they had to turn up the volume on Maddy’s sound soother. Evidently for Jackson, noise pollution isn’t nearly as intrusive as having pine needles blown onto his property.

Everything feels scary—the coffin-like prism, the Gothic lighting, the thunder rumble of bass from next door. They observe silently, but there is no thunder from the heavens, no shifting of tectonic plates. Rebecca blows out a breath she didn’t know she was holding, and Mark follows suit. They laugh a little at themselves.

She is tempted to lift the prism’s lid, but there is no handle, no latch, the seam so tight that not even fingernails can slip in to pry it up.

It only opens from the inside.

“What do we do?” Mark asks.

“I guess wait,” Rebecca says.

Her answer hangs heavily in the air between them. Mark doesn’t seem to like it any more than she does.

Chapter 10

They awaken to the sound of running water coming from somewhere down the hall. Is it a leak? An intruder? Could that be the shower?

Rebecca jerks up, wild eyed. Mark is already shoving his legs into jeans.

She thinks of the busted pipe they had last winter that flooded the powder room and forced them to tear out the floor and redo the wainscoting.

A flicker in a dark corner of her mind conjures up the rectangular prism, but she is not willing to contend with the notion in full at 2:37 in the morning.

She pulls on a bathrobe and enters the hall at Mark’s back. Maddy’s door is closed. The nursery door too.

They creep down the unlit hall together in the direction of the kitchen. As they near the nursery, it becomes undeniable that the sound of rushing water is issuing from behind the shut door.