My husband strapped me to a rocking chair while pregnant because his mother wanted me to soothe his sister’s screaming twins for the entire night. His father removed my back brace, and his brother locked the nursery. Blood from my injured shoulder stained the baby blanket. At dawn, they brought in a third crib and said my own child would soon join the schedule.

The Elm Street house looked different in the afternoon light.

Without the storm and the darkness, it was just a mediocre four-bedroom split-level with peeling cream paint and an overgrown lawn. A yellow three-drawer filing cabinet had been tipped over on the front porch, its drawers spilling instruction manuals for power tools onto the concrete.

A police cruiser sat idling at the curb.

Officer Davis—the same officer who had cut the belts—stepped out of the vehicle as Rachel and I approached in a taxi.

"They're not inside, ma'am," Davis said, nodding to me with a respectful distance. "Arthur and Evelyn posted bond an hour ago, but the conditions of release explicitly bar them from being within five hundred feet of the property while you recover your belongings. We have a car watching their second property down on 4th Street."

I stepped out of the cab, leaning heavily on Rachel's arm.

Walking up the driveway felt like navigating a minefield. Every step brought back the sound of the wooden chair dragging against the hardwood, the smell of the formula, the weight of the twin against my bruised chest.

The front door was unlocked, the glass frame still taped over where Clara had smashed it three days prior.

Inside, the house was dead silent.

We walked past the living room—where a stack of unopened baby shower gifts sat on the sofa—and up the stairs toward Arthur's office at the back of the house.

The door to the nursery was wide open.

I stopped in the doorway.

The room had been cleared. The two white cribs were gone. The rocking chair was gone, leaving two deep, crushed grooves in the blue rug where its rear runners had sat.

Only one thing remained.

On the wall above where the third crib had stood, someone had mounted a large, dry-erase whiteboard.

Written at the top in Evelyn's neat, schoolteacher script was a title: THE NURSERY ROTATION.

Below it, a grid had been drawn in black marker.

00:00 - 04:00: Maya (Twins A & B) 04:00 - 08:00: Maya (Baby C + Laundry) 08:00 - 12:00: Clara (Rest/Kitchen) 12:00 - 16:00: Maya (All)

The chart stretched across seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

Rachel stepped into the room behind me. She looked at the board for three seconds before her hand went to her mouth.

"They had it mapped out," she whispered, her voice cracking for the first time since she had arrived in Chicago. "They built a schedule for you like you were a piece of livestock."

I walked up to the board.

I took the blue dry-erase marker lying on the narrow plastic ledge at the bottom.

In large, jagged letters, I drew a single, thick diagonal line through every hour of every day on the grid.