Chapter 2: The Bottle
“Tell me exactly what you saw,” Dr. Sterling said.
My daughter hugged the bear against her school jacket. Her fingers were trembling, but her voice stayed clear.
“Grandma poured the baby’s medicine down the sink. Then she put the purple sleepy medicine in his syringe.”
My mother-in-law leaned forward. “She’s seven. She gets confused.”
“I’m not confused,” my daughter said. “I took his real medicine out of the trash because his name was on it.”
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Dr. Sterling held out his hand, and she carefully passed him the bottle. The pharmacy label was still intact. The liquid inside sat almost at the original fill line, even though my son had supposedly been receiving it for several days.
The smirk on my mother-in-law’s face faltered for the first time. My husband stepped closer, already shaping the next dismissal, but Dr. Sterling was no longer looking at either of them. He was reading the label, checking the fill line against the date, and then looking at the flushed, listless infant in my arms with an expression that had shifted from polite skepticism to focused concern.
