She brushed Maisie’s hair away from the bandage. “Where did you hear that name, sweetheart?”
Maisie frowned as though the question were more difficult than expected. She looked toward the corner of the room near the narrow window, then back at her mother with an expression that contained neither fear nor confusion. Whatever answer she was considering seemed perfectly ordinary to her.
Before she could speak, Evan returned carrying two paper cups and a bag from the vending area. He stopped just inside the doorway when he saw Tessa’s face, and the concern in his expression deepened as she turned toward him. Tessa waited until he set the cups down, then told him exactly what Maisie had asked.
The bag slipped slightly in his hand.
He recovered it before it fell, but the movement was enough to confirm that the name had struck him harder than he wanted to show. Tessa watched him glance at Maisie, then at the corner of the room her daughter had been studying a moment earlier.
“Did you tell her?” he asked.
Tessa shook her head.
Evan moved closer to the bed, though he did not touch Maisie at first. His face carried the strained concentration of a man trying to locate a rational explanation before anyone else could offer a worse one. He asked his daughter gently where she had heard the name, keeping his voice soft enough that the question did not sound like an interrogation.
Maisie looked between her parents.
Her eyelids were already growing heavy again, and the medication had left her too tired to recognize the significance of their attention. She curled her fingers around the edge of the blanket and murmured that she did not remember, then settled deeper into the pillow.
Within minutes she was asleep.
Tessa remained beside the bed while Evan stood near the window, both of them listening to the same quiet machinery and arriving at different versions of the same fear. She did not believe a dead child had somehow spoken to her daughter, and she had no intention of allowing Lenora’s superstition to dictate what happened next. Yet someone had introduced the name Abby into Maisie’s world, and until Tessa understood who had done it, she would no longer accept any family explanation simply because the Hawthornes had repeated it long enough.
She unlocked her phone again and looked at the empty search results for Abigail Hawthorne.
This time, instead of closing the browser, she opened a new tab and began searching old county records.