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blood, she panicked. “What…happened?”
    He should have stayed there and waited for the medics to come get her. He should have radioed for help. But should hardly seemed to apply anymore, and so Patrick lifted Josie into his arms. He carried her out of the locker room where she’d nearly been killed, hurried down the stairs, and pushed through the front door of the school, as if he might be able to save them both.
    Seventeen Years Before
    T here were fourteen people sitting in front of Lacy, if you counted the fact that each of the seven women attending this prenatal class was pregnant. Some of them had come equipped with notebooks and pens, and had spent the past hour and a half writing down recommended dosages of folic acid, the names of teratogens, and suggested diets for a mother-to-be. Two had turned green in the middle of the discussion of a normal birth and had rushed to the bathroom with morning sickness-which, of course, stretched as long as the whole day, and was like saying summertime when you really meant all four seasons of the year.
    She was tired. Only a week back into work after her own maternity leave, it seemed patently unfair that if she wasn’t up all night with her own baby, she had to be awake delivering someone else’s. Her breasts ached, an uncomfortable reminder that she had to go pump again, so that she’d have milk to leave the sitter tomorrow for Peter.
    And yet, she loved her job too much to give it up entirely. She’d had the grades to get into medical school, and had considered being an OB/GYN, until she realized that she had a profound inability to sit bedside by a patient and not feel her pain. Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down. She switched into a program that would certify her as a nurse-midwife, that encouraged her to tap into the emotional health of a mother-to-be instead of just her symptomology. Maybe it made some of the doctors at the hospital consider her a flake, but Lacy truly believed that when you asked a patient How do you feel?, what was wrong wasn’t nearly as important as what was right.
    She reached past the plastic model of the growing fetus and lifted a best-selling pregnancy guidebook into the air. “How many of you have seen this book before?”
    Seven hands lifted.
    “Okay. Do not buy this book. Do not read this book. If it’s already at your house, throw it out. This book will convince you that you are going to bleed out, have seizures, drop dead, or any of a hundred other things that do not happen with normal pregnancies. Believe me, the range of normal is much wider than anything these authors will tell you.”
    She glanced in the back, where a woman was holding her side. Cramping? Lacy thought. Ectopic pregnancy?
    The woman was dressed in a black suit, her hair pulled back into a neat, low ponytail. Lacy watched her pinch her waist once again, this time pulling off a small beeper attached to her skirt. She got to her feet. “I…um, I’m sorry. I have to go.”
    “Can it wait a few minutes?” Lacy asked. “We’re just about to go on a tour of the birthing pavilion.”
    The woman handed her the paperwork she’d been asked to fill out during this visit. “I have something more pressing to deal with,” she said, and she hurried off.
    “Well,” Lacy said. “Maybe this is a good time for a bathroom break.” As the six remaining women filed out of the room, she glanced down at the forms in her hand. Alexandra Cormier, she read. And she thought: I’m going to have to watch this one.
    The last time Alex had defended Loomis Bronchetti, he had broken into three homes and stolen electronics equipment, which he then tried to fence on the streets of Enfield, New Hampshire. Although Loomis was enterprising enough to dream up this scheme, he failed to realize that in a town as small as Enfield, hot stereo equipment might raise a red flag.
    Apparently, Loomis had escalated his criminal résumé last