With Love from the Inside (23 page)

Sophie heard what she thought was Thomas's pager go off and felt relieved to be finally back in her own bed. She rolled over to put her arm around him.

“Hold on,” Thomas said, “your IV will get caught.”

“Thomas?” She saw him push a button that made the blue machine stop.

“Everything's okay. I'm right here.” He straightened out the tubing trailing from the top of her hand and then kissed her forehead.

“Where am I?” The tape on her arm started to pull as she shifted in the bed.

“In the hospital. You've been out for a while.”

“The hospital? What day is it?”

Thomas took his cell phone and checked the time. “About eleven-thirty-seven p.m.—the day after Christmas.” He pulled up a chair close to her bed and sat down.

She picked at the tape on her hand and tried to make sense of what he was saying.
The prison. Our baby.
Sophie started to put the events together, but nothing felt right.

“What happened to me? Is the baby . . . ?”

“So you did know?” Thomas put his hands behind his neck, then dropped his head.

“I was going to tell you. Things just became complicated.” She tried to sit up but felt weak and queasy. “I needed time to process everything.”

Thomas scratched his jaw. His wrinkled shirt and scruffy face told Sophie he'd been with her for a while.

“Is the baby okay?”

“The heartbeat's strong.” He shifted forward in his chair. “Which means you probably won't miscarry.”

“What happened, then? Why am I here?” Sophie put her hands between her legs to see if there was any blood.

“For one thing, you're significantly dehydrated and you're anemic.” He leaned over, picked up the clipboard hooked on the end of the bed, and checked something. “Not sure why you were bleeding, but your blood pressure is extremely high.” Thomas glanced at the monitors by the side of her bed, then read some papers.

“You have to rest and stay calm.” His authoritative tone made him seem like her doctor.

Sophie nodded.

“For yourself and for our baby.” This time he spoke from a different place, more vulnerable, like a dad.

“I'm so sorry, Thomas.” She reached her arm out to him.

He tossed the chart on the end of her bed without responding.

“How'd you know where I was?”

Thomas grabbed the pink pitcher from the nightstand. He filled a cup with water, stuck in a bent straw, and handed it to her.

“I was there,” he said to her after she swallowed.

“Where?” She pulled the straw out of her mouth and tried once again to sit up.

“I saw her.” He took the cup from her and set it on the nightstand.

“Who?” Sophie asked. She could feel the blood draining from her entire head and settling in her stomach.

“I met your mom.”

For a minute she thought he was playing a cruel joke on her. Payback for the lies, for not telling him about the baby. “My mom?”

Thomas nodded.

She'd never seen him look this way before. His body seemed unnaturally stiff and his words deliberate. “You should've told me.”

She watched him contract his shoulders and his neck while she struggled with how to reply. He watched her, too, confusion seeping from his eyes.

“I didn't know how.” Her breath snagged as she tried to explain. “One lie turned into another. I was ashamed.”

Thomas started to reach for her hand, but he pulled back.

“Can you ever forgive me?”

Before Thomas could answer, someone opened the door.

A nurse walked in with her stethoscope slung around her neck. She was carrying something. “I'm glad to see you're awake and talking. How you feeling?”

“I'm not sure,” Sophie said to her, but she meant it for Thomas. She couldn't be sure until he answered her question.

“The doctor wants you to try to eat something. Anything sound good?” She placed a tray with a bowl of tomato soup and packaged crackers in front of her.

Sophie shook her head. “I'll try the crackers.”

The nurse took the package off the tray and opened it for her. “I can order you something else. A sandwich, maybe?”

Nothing Sophie could think of sounded good, but she was thirsty. “Do you have any root beer?”

—

“W
HAT
'
S SHE LIKE
?” Sophie asked Thomas after the night-shift nurse left the room.

Thomas had already stretched out on the empty bed closest to the window. His back was turned to her, and she thought he might be asleep.

“Your mom?” he asked. He sat up and pushed back the peach-striped curtain that semi-divided the room.

“Does she hate me?”

Thomas swung his legs around and sat on the side of the bed. He straightened the bedsheets before answering. “No, she doesn't hate anything about you.”

Sophie picked at the lint balls on her blanket. “After my dad died, I was all alone. Our church brought me food for a while, but no one knew what to say to the poor orphaned girl whose mom was on death row.”

Thomas didn't say anything.

“When I left for college, I realized no one knew me, knew my story. I could be anyone I wanted. Before I knew it, I'd become someone else.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” The word
me
shot right across the room.

“I wanted you to accept me. I loved you from the first moment you walked into Starbucks. You knew where you were going, what you wanted. I didn't. I drifted into your life by accident, and it was by pure luck you decided to love me.”

He stood up and walked over to her bed. He pulled the covers down and slid in beside her. “You drifted into my life because you were supposed to.” The tenseness in his posture had started to fade. “There was nothing accidental about it. I looked in the window and watched you make dozens of lattes before I had the nerve to ask you out.”

Sophie rolled over and laid her head on his chest. “You watched me? Why didn't you ever tell me?”

“I guess there's a lot of things we didn't tell each other.”

She wrapped her arm around him. When she finally let go she asked him, “How'd you find out about my mom?”

“It took some work. I didn't understand why you left. Nothing made sense. At first I thought maybe you didn't believe me about Eva, then
I thought maybe you were disappointed in me about the whole malpractice thing. I called Carter to talk it through. He did a background search and found some information.”

“So Carter knows?”

“My whole family does.”

Sophie adjusted the neck of her hospital gown to make sure it was covering her. “I suppose that went over well.”

“I don't know how well it went over.” He rolled over so he was facing her. “It doesn't matter.” He pulled her hospital gown up and put his hand on her bare stomach. “All that matters to me is you and this little baby.”

—

“N
O
,” S
OPHIE CRIED OUT
. “Stop. You're hurting her!”

Thomas jiggled her shoulder. “Wake up.” He put a wet washcloth over her sweaty hair. “Everything's okay. You're having a bad dream.”

Sophie opened her eyes, glad to be out of her nightmare, then realized she wasn't.

“All these years,” she blurted, “I blamed my mother for something she didn't do.” She took the washcloth off her head and threw it across the room. “Her baby died. My little brother. People in my small town hated her. Called her all kinds of horrible names.”

She buried her face in her blanket.

“You need to calm down.” Thomas gently scratched the side of her arm. “For our baby.”

“I scoured the court records looking for anything to prove my mom didn't poison William, but all the evidence said that she did.” She pulled the blanket away from her face. “I was with her when she bought windshield-wiper fluid.”

Thomas hesitated. “You had no way of knowing.”

“How will she ever forgive me?”

He put his index finger on the dimple under her lip. “She already has.”

Sophie looked out the door and saw Ben pacing the hallway. “Would you please come in and sit down?” Sophie yelled to him. “Tell him to get in here.”

Thomas shut off ESPN and stepped out into the hallway. By this time, Ben felt like family. Thomas told her how a worried Ben stayed by her side in the emergency room until he could get there and arrange to have her transferred to Duke. “He cares about your mom and about you,” Thomas told her. Ben had explained to him the need for the genetic testing before Sophie had the chance.

“What's wrong with you?” she said to Ben when he appeared in the doorway. “You're making me nervous.”

“What's wrong with me?” He waved his arm at the IVs still attached to Sophie's arm.

“What's your gut telling you?” she asked him.

“My gut's telling me the geneticist is going to tell us exactly what we already know.”

“My mom's innocent?” Sophie looked at Ben and then Thomas for confirmation.

Ben was heading for the hallway to pace again when Dr. Blakely, the geneticist, met him at the door. “We have the results of your test.”

Thomas held out his hand. “Thanks for rushing these.”

Sophie raised the head of her bed while Thomas and Ben stood on either side of the doctor. He laid out the lab sheets on the overbed table.

“This metabolic disorder is mapped to a mutation in the gene.” He pointed to a number value on the paper. “This is your wife's sample.”

Thomas picked up the paper and examined it more closely. “She has the carrier mutation.”

“So that means her parents had to be carriers, too, right?” Ben said with cautious excitement.

“Sure does,” Dr. Blakely replied.

“What about my baby?” Sophie couldn't celebrate until she was sure her baby would be okay.

“That's some more good news. Thomas has two normal genes. Your baby will not be affected.”

After the doctor left, and Sophie gave Ben a long and overdue hug, he gathered his coat and packed up his briefcase. “We have the evidence. Now we need to pray someone will listen to it.”

A metabolic disorder.
William died of a metabolic disorder.

I'm trying to process all of this, but I don't understand.

Ben's roller-coaster visit confused me. One minute I'm feeling elated and hopeful, the next vindicated but disgusted. Why couldn't anyone save my baby?

Ben told me you were here. YOU WERE HERE! That news makes me jump up and down. Thanks for coming back to me!

The tiny lines on the corners of Ben's eyes pointed upward when he told me the news. “Sophie and I came to visit you on Christmas Day.” His presence felt lighter than it had the last time I saw him.

“What are you talking about? I didn't see you.”

“Sophie and I came.”

“Soph . . . Sophie was here?” I, on the other hand, stuttered. My spine cracked against the back of the metal chair. I felt like I might topple over.

“That's what I tried to tell you when you called. I found Sophie.”

“You found Sophie, and her husband found me?”

“Something like that.” Ben shrugged in disbelief. “She came to see me because she had some information.”

“Information? What in the world are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about your husband and your daughter. They may have saved your life.” He talked fast, but paused long enough to emphasize the word
may
. “Remember you told me Paul kept working on your case after you were convicted?”

I nodded. “That's all he did when he wasn't working or taking care of Sophie.”

“Sophie came to visit me on Christmas Eve. We visited your old house and dug through his paperwork. To make a long story short, we talked to Dr. Robinson. The person Paul hired to test the baby bottle.”

“Test the baby bottle?” I took a quick look around the room to make sure the officer wasn't going to cut our time short. “Who did what?”

“I had no idea, either, but we found his name.”

“How'd you find his name?” I tried to scratch my forehead, but the chain holding my wrist to my waist was too short.

“We'll fill you in on that later.” Ben stared at the clock on the wall. “The point is, the tests were negative. No windshield-wiper fluid.”

“I know.”

“Sorry,” Ben said. He reached across the table to touch my hands, but they were in my lap.

“Wrap it up,” the officer notified. He held up his spread hand to indicate we had five more minutes.

“Why am I just now hearing this?” Was I missing something?

“Paul died and he never received those results. He didn't tell you because he didn't know.”

Paul knew. He always knew. He didn't need a lab to tell him I didn't kill William.

“That's not the best part. Dr. Robinson thinks William died of a metabolic disorder.”

“A metabolic disorder?”

“Some type of metabolic acidemia.”

“Is that why he threw up? Is that why he wouldn't wake up?” I felt sad and relieved at the same time. “His pediatrician? Why didn't he know?”

“It's rare. They didn't know much about it when William was an infant.”

I tried to take hold of what he was telling me. “What does this mean?” Would it change anything?

“It means we have a genetic test providing evidence that you didn't kill William.”

“From a baby bottle?”

“No. From your daughter. Sophie is a carrier for the same disease.”

“She is?”

He might as well have been speaking in Japanese, but at least it sounded like good news. “Will she be okay?”

I couldn't stand it if you were sick.

“She's fine. Her—” He stopped. I could tell he wasn't telling me everything.

“Grace, this is all good news. I'm just sorry it took so long to discover.”

“Me, too.” I knew it wasn't his fault. And I didn't know who to blame.

“I have a lot of work to do. The only hope we have left is executive clemency.”

“The governor?” My newfound hope started to sink. “Is that even a possibility?”

“I hope so. We've exhausted all our appeals. We're throwing a big Hail Mary.”

Ben crossed his fingers and placed them over his heart. I closed my eyes and prayed.

When I opened my eyes, he said, “Your daughter is lovely.”

“So I've heard.”

“She's a phenomenal young woman. We waited to see you. When we finally got to the window, the officer wouldn't let her through.”

“Because of Thomas?”

Ben nodded. “She had to leave town. How about setting up a phone call?”

“Do you even have to ask?”

“I didn't think so.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a yellow piece of paper. Typed beside Sophie's name was her telephone number.