Ellie frowned. “Can’t he go with her?”
“Not to the hospital.”
“What if she needs him?”
That question sat heavier than the child could know.
Because if the dog needed to be near the baby, the baby might not be the only one he had been guarding. The thought was clearly bothering the adults involved in the case too. When Ethan mentioned it, Karen nodded. “Detective Morales thinks Chloe may have told him to stay.
We just need to find Chloe and figure out what state she’s in, mentally and physically, before anybody makes assumptions.” Then, lowering her voice slightly, she added, “Some girls hide pregnancies because they’re terrified. Some women leave babies because they want to hurt them. Sometimes it’s in between. I’m glad your daughter found the first thing instead of the last.”
The phrase haunted Ethan all the way home.
By Monday afternoon, the police located Chloe Bennett.
She had been hiding not far away at a vacant farmhouse owned by her late father’s brother. Jenna Bennett, after a tearful, confused interview with Morales, remembered that Chloe sometimes went there when she wanted to be alone because the property had been in the family for decades. Officers found her in the downstairs bedroom under a stack of quilts, feverish, weak, and in desperate need of postpartum medical care. She had not been running, exactly. She had been unraveling. When the officers told her the baby was alive and at the hospital, she cried so violently she could barely answer questions.