Chapter 3 - What was in my blood
The substance wasn't poison.
That almost made it worse.
It was a prescription medication that could affect blood pressure and increase certain pregnancy risks under specific circumstances.
A medication I had never been prescribed.
“How did it get inside her?” Caleb demanded.
The physician refused to speculate.
Detective Cole did not.
“Mrs. Rowan, did anyone give you medication yesterday?”
I remembered.
Lorraine had brought tea.
She always brought tea when she wanted to perform kindness.
“Chamomile,” she'd said.
“For the baby.”
I drank half.
Caleb left the room and vomited.
But the toxicology result wasn't conclusive proof of intentional poisoning. There were medical explanations investigators still had to eliminate.
Lorraine denied everything.
She claimed I was confused.
Traumatized.
Hormonal.
Then she produced her defense.
Messages.
Dozens of them.
Apparently sent from my phone to an unknown number over three months.
Intimate enough to imply an affair.
Caleb read only two before stopping.
“I've never written these.”
Lorraine smiled sadly.
“That’s what she’ll tell you.”
She had come to the hospital with an attorney.
That scared me more than her denial.
People falsely accused of something sometimes call lawyers.
People who prepared something often do too.
Then Lorraine showed Caleb another photograph.
Elias entering our house two weeks earlier.
Caleb looked at me.
I shook my head.
“He wasn't there.”
Elias confirmed it.
He had never visited before the emergency.
Detective Cole requested the original image.
Lorraine refused.
Her attorney ended the conversation.
That evening, Caleb sat beside our daughter's incubator.
We had named her Grace.
“She planned this,” he whispered.
I watched our tiny daughter breathing beneath NICU lights.
“Maybe.”
“You don't believe that?”
“I believe your mother hates me.”
“Then what don't you believe?”
I looked at him.
“That she did all this just to make you leave me.”
Because Lorraine had been trying to turn Caleb against me for years.
She didn't need forged messages, a doctor’s jacket, medical interference and potentially drugged tea.
This was too elaborate.
Too dangerous.
Something had changed.
The next morning, Elias requested to speak with me privately.
He looked nervous.
“Hannah, there's something I didn't tell the police.”
Caleb stiffened.
Elias placed an envelope beside my bed.
“Three weeks ago, someone paid my office to transfer your complete prenatal records.”
“To whom?”
“That’s the problem.”
He looked at Caleb.
“The authorization carried your signature.”
Caleb stared at it.
“I never signed this.”
Neither had I.
But beneath Caleb’s forged signature was the name of the person requesting my records.
A private fertility clinic in Savannah.
May you like
And suddenly I knew Lorraine wasn't merely trying to destroy my marriage.
She was looking for something inside my pregnancy.
