Red marks.
Along his back.
Small, angry welts.
She held him against her chest. “Shh… I’m here. I’ve got you.”
But Oliver screamed harder.
Emily had been a nanny before becoming a maid. She knew babies. She knew hunger cries. Gas cries. Fear cries.
This was none of those.
This was agony.
She remembered the night the Caldwells brought Oliver home from the hospital. In just two weeks, three nannies had quit, each claiming the baby was “impossible” or “colicky beyond help.”
That’s when Emily had been asked to add childcare to her duties—for a small raise she desperately needed to send money back to her mother in Ohio.
The pediatrician had visited twice.
“Some babies just cry more,” he’d said with a shrug. “Colic. He’ll grow out of it.”
Emily didn’t believe that anymore.
She paced the nursery, bouncing Oliver gently, scanning every inch of the room.
Everything was perfect.
Organic sheets.
A temperature-controlled nursery.
A state-of-the-art baby monitor.
Yet something felt deeply wrong.
Oliver would calm in her arms… then scream the moment she laid him down.
“Not fussy,” Emily whispered through tears. “You’re terrified.”
She laid him on the changing table and examined him more closely.