Page 27 of The Delivery

Poor thing. Can you even imagine?

Like daughter, like mother.

Rebecca holds a crisp pace. Visible through doorways and windows, house employees bustle like animated characters on a Disney ride, making beds, folding cloth napkins, dipping through the black sheet of an infinity pool to test the pH level.

Finally Rebecca enters the massive foyer, but with every step she takes, the front doors seem to recede. The Lichtenstein notes her progress, unimpressed.

She’s just reached the door when she hears, “Ms. Rebecca?”

Her kiss-and-ride name.

She turns.

Sydney stands at the lip of another preposterously wide hallway, dwarfed by the architectural scale. Behind her, fifteen feet down the hall, stands a squat, dour-faced woman, who Rebecca takes to be the watchful nanny.

Wearing a navy blue cardigan sweater against the mausoleum chill, Sydney looks young and lost.

Rebecca registers the slightest softening in her momma-bear heart.

“I didn’t think she’d get burned, like, for real,” Sydney says, twisting her wrist loosely in her opposite hand.

“Even so,” Rebecca says, not unkindly, “it was mean.”

Sydney nods and then nods again. “Sorry.”

“No more, okay? No more mean.”

Sydney lowers her face. “She screamed real loud.”

“Yes,” Rebecca says. “She did.”

Tears dot the marble tile at Sydney’s feet. She lets go of the wrist she’s been rubbing, and that’s when Rebecca sees it, feather-like bruising along her forearm from where it has been grabbed.

“Tell her I’m sorry,” Sydney says.

Despite her best efforts, Rebecca feels her anger melt away. “Okay, honey,” she says. “I will.”

Chapter 20

It is nearly eleven o’clock at night when the doorbell rings.

It is striking how menacing an ordinary sound can be at an unexpected time.

Rebecca fumbles for Mark before remembering that he is still at the office. His mornings start earlier and earlier, his nights ending later. Rebecca can’t remember the last time she’s seen him in daylight.

Rolling over, she grabs her phone, checks the video doorbell app. No one there, no sign of a car at the curb. A late-night delivery?

Did she dream it?

Out of bed, into her dowdy bathrobe that Mark bought her for the hospital when she was pregnant with Maddy, the one she kept with hopeful anticipation and now cannot bring herself to part with.

After checking the yard from the living room and sidelight windows, she finally musters the courage to open the front door and step onto the porch. Her bare feet stick to the concrete, and she looks down in horror to see

—red-brown spatter on the matte porcelain floor tiles—

something spread across the porch, thick like blood, like matter

—crimson handprint on the side of the bathtub—