The day came for Kate to leave. Sophie and Kate said their
goodbyes, promising to talk every day on the phone. Sophie
watched the back of Kate’s head as she and her Uber merged
into the snarl of the city traffic. She went back inside and took
the stairs up to the fourth floor. Reaching to open the NICU
doors, Sophie caught sight of Dr. Wagner and Amanda as they
stepped onto the elevator. They had their heads together, arms
so close she wondered if they were holding hands. The elevator
door closed.
Walking into the pod, Sophie immediately sensed it. Some
thing wasn’t right. It felt off. When she walked up to Danny’s
incubator, it was empty. His IV pole stood there with the tubing
still connected to the bag of fluid, but the end that should have
been attached to Danny’s arm was dangling from the top of the
pole.
“Kim!” Sophie yelled.
There was no answer.
“Kim!” she called again. “Kim! Where did Danny go?” She
spun around, shrieking, “Where’s my baby?”
She looked to the three other mothers and the cleaning lady
wiping out a sink. “Did any of you see what happened to Danny?”
They looked at her, not knowing what she was shouting
about.
“Kim went to the front desk for a minute. She’ll be right
back. What’s wrong?”
144
JULIE HATCH
When they saw the empty incubator and Sophie’s hysteria,
they started talking at once.
“What happened?”
“How can a baby just disappear?”
“What do we do . . . ?”
“Maybe—”
“I thought I saw—”
“Isn’t there secur—”
“He can’t have just disappeared!”
Sophie ran out of the pod. “Where is my baby?” she screamed.
“Where’s Danny?”
Kim came running and grabbed Sophie by the shoulders.
“What is it, Sophie?”
“Someone took Danny! He’s not in his incubator.”
Kim rushed over to where Danny should have been. When
she saw the empty crib, she left as quickly as she had come in. She
called security, who announced a “Code Amber”—baby abduc
tion—and ordered a lockdown of the unit, followed by a hospital
lockdown. When Sophie heard the code over the loudspeaker,
she started to shake.
Security came and questioned the other mothers—no, they
hadn’t seen anybody suspicious in the pod. As they recounted the
past fifteen minutes, they realized that there had been a couple
of minutes when only Kim was in the pod. She had been busy
securing a baby’s breathing tube and had had her head down.
That must have been when Danny went missing.
Security had already shut down the hospital exits and was
preparing to shut down the city block when Dr. Sheldon walked
in. He was wheeling a transport crib with Danny inside, sound
asleep.
Kim went nuts. Grabbing the crib away from Sheldon and
wheeling it to Danny’s bedspace, she demanded, “Sheldon, where
in the world have you been? What were you thinking?”
145
THE VERY BEST OF CARE
Sophie collapsed in the chair. “Where did you take him?
Why did you take him out of here?”
“Sheldon, why didn’t you tell me?” Kim demanded.
“I did. You must not have heard me,” he answered.
Sophie glared at him. “I can’t believe what you just did. What
were you doing with him?”
“Sophie, don’t you remember? Today was a day for his isotope
infusion. I had him down the hall in my office. Geez, I’m sorry to
have set off a kidnapping scare.”
Sophie was livid.
“I gotta go,” Sheldon said, clearly feeling the heat from
Sophie and Kim. He ducked out the door
