Chapter 1 - THE CRY BEHIND THE WALL
“YOUR BABY IS LOCKED IN THE HOT CAR!”
Roman Bellini knocked his chair over getting up.
Four-year-old Sophie Miller stood in his study, one sandal hanging off her foot, a red plastic stethoscope bouncing against her chest.
“The silver one,” she gasped. “By the wall.”
At 2:47 on Charleston’s hottest Sunday of the summer, his six-month-old son was supposed to be upstairs with a nurse.
“I heard him crying.”
Behind Sophie, Martha, the senior housekeeper, reached for the doorframe. “Mr. Bellini, I tried to—”
“The child shouldn’t be outside in this heat,” Charles Vane said.
The family attorney barely lifted his eyes from his phone.
Roman was already running.
He crossed the terrace, hit the gravel, and rounded the garden wall. A silver sedan sat in the narrow service lane.
The doors were locked.
Through the tinted rear window, he saw Nicholas strapped into his car seat. His little head had fallen sideways. His mouth opened, but the sound barely reached the glass.
“Nicholas.”
Roman yanked the handle again.
“NICHOLAS!”
His security chief, Dean Mercer, came running. Roman grabbed the emergency window tool from Dean’s belt and smashed a window away from the baby. Dean called 911 while Roman reached through and opened the door.
Heat rolled out.
Roman’s hands, steady through threats and bloodshed and everything he never discussed at home, shook against the buckle.
“I’ve got you,” he whispered. “Daddy’s got you.”
Nicholas didn’t reach for him.
That terrified him more than anything.
Following the dispatcher’s instructions, they carried the baby into the air-conditioned foyer. Roman knelt beside him, hearing the sirens, hearing his own breath, hearing a memory he had spent six months trying to bury.
Claire’s ambulance had come too late.
Not again.
Behind him, Rachel Miller clutched Sophie against her housekeeping uniform.
“You did good,” she whispered into her daughter’s hair. “You did so good.”
The paramedics took over. Roman backed away only when they made him.
Then he noticed the nursery monitor on the console.
On its bright little screen, Nicholas was sleeping peacefully upstairs.
Roman stared at the image.
His son lay on a stretcher ten feet away.
But on the monitor, his chest rose and fell beneath a blue blanket.
“Dean,” Roman said quietly.
The security chief followed his gaze.
Neither man spoke.
May you like
On the screen, the sleeping baby moved his hand.
And the same hand moved again, exactly the same way.
