Only Ever You by Rebecca Drake

Author:Rebecca Drake
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466877702
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

chapter twenty-three

DAY EIGHT

“It isn’t confirmed,” Andrew said. “They don’t know if it’s Sophia.” He had to raise his voice to be heard above Jill’s cry. It came from somewhere deep inside her, a guttural, inhuman noise. “We have to go to the morgue,” Andrew continued, his face pale. “They need you to, well, to identify her.”

Jill stared blankly out the car window, waiting for a traffic light to change. They were moving so slowly. It wasn’t confirmed, they didn’t know that it was Sophia. Images of her daughter cycled through her mind—Sophia rolling over, learning to walk, her first tooth, her first solid food, the first time Jill had held her in her arms. All of these images played, a photomontage Möbius strip. She couldn’t be dead; wouldn’t Jill feel it inside if her daughter had left her? She remembered what it had been like with Ethan, how she’d known something was wrong, how she’d had that feeling.

The morgue was in the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office, a long, two-story building on Penn Avenue with a few wooden picnic tables out front. Was that to make it seem cheery? They just added to Jill’s surreal feeling. A patrolman waved Andrew into a fenced lot across the street, just as a police car, lights flashing, pulled up behind them. Detective Ottilo leapt out and came toward them. Jill stepped out of Andrew’s car, amazed that she could walk—she felt completely disconnected from her body, everything was numb.

Ottilo fell into step with the three of them, grim-faced. “It hasn’t been confirmed,” he said. “We don’t know if this is Sophia.”

Jill swallowed hard, managed to ask, “Why don’t they know if it’s her?”

The detective hesitated, rubbing a hand over his face. “The bod—the child was found in the river,” he said at last. “It’s hard to identify after a certain amount of … decomposition.”

“My God!” Jill sagged, swaying like a puppet whose strings have been dropped. David caught her and together with Andrew, they supported her through the sliding doors and into the morgue. Quiet inside, the quiet of the dead, but strangely peaceful, too, like a church or temple. Across a tiled floor, a guard sat at a wooden desk. He paged the medical examiner and indicated some padded benches. Jill took a seat and then David began to hyperventilate and sank down next to her, dropping his head between his legs for a few minutes, struggling to breathe normally.

The medical examiner looked like an aging hipster, with a carefully knotted bow tie peeking out at the top of his lab coat, carefully groomed beard, and square, black rimmed reading glasses. He talked quietly with Ottilo off to the side for a moment before coming over to them. “Does your daughter have any birthmarks or moles?” he asked in a solemn voice. “Or any other identifying marks?”

“She has a birthmark on the back of her knee, a tiny café-au-lait spot,” Jill said. “And she has a few red splotches at the base of her hairline.

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