She generally avoided talking about this, as well. It was too fresh, too painful. But with Mack, she preferred this topic to some of the others he could’ve chosen. At least this had nothing to do with them. “Part of the reason.”
“What’s the rest?”
“The divorce. The loss of my practice. Having to move and work as a school nurse after all the effort I put into becoming a doctor. Take your pick.” She frowned, feeling the terrible burden of regret, which somehow grew heavier at night. “But mostly what my nurse did.”
“I’ve never heard of anyone doing anything like that before. You must be devastated.”
“There are so many emotions zinging around inside me I don’t know how to cope with them all, so I try to ignore the crushing pressure on my heart. I have a son who’s depending on me. I can’t give way.”
“You’re going to be fine,” he said. “You’ll get over this.”
“Maybe I will, but what about the family who lost their little girl? I doubt they will. I became a doctor because I wanted to help people, especially children. To think that my nurse would purposely harm my patients...” She squeezed her eyes closed as she remembered all the times she’d had to call an ambulance to her office, not realizing that Maxine was capable of doing the things she’d done—and then the worst day of her life, when the child she’d been trying to save didn’t survive. “That’s just...beyond my understanding.”
He rested his elbows on his knees. “I don’t get her motivation. What did she have to gain?”
“Attention. The adrenaline rush of causing the alarm. Feeling important and in the thick of it. In some misguided way, I believe she wanted to put these children in danger so that we could then be praised for saving them. That’s the closest I can come to explaining, after reading everything I can find on Munchausen by proxy.”
“So she was doing you a favor,” he said sarcastically.
“She painted it that way once I confronted her.”
“That’s crazy. I don’t know how she lives with herself.”
“I don’t, either. After what’s happened, I can barely go on.”
He nudged her knee with his own. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She would’ve said nothing and let it go at that, but she felt obligated to clarify. She knew he was especially sensitive to any reference to suicide. His mother had killed herself with pills when he was just a little boy, and he’d been the one to find her. Natasha hadn’t been intimating that she’d do anything like that, but because of his background, she could see why his mind might automatically go in that direction. “It means I can’t help feeling responsible.”
There. She’d said it. What she felt in her heart but had been terrified to say for fear just speaking the words aloud would establish them as fact. Had she been more aware, more diligent, more intuitive—instead of focusing so much effort and energy on her crumbling marriage—maybe she would’ve recognized what was going on much sooner. And that could’ve saved little Amelia Grossman’s life.
Mack took her hand. “Listen to me, Tash. It wasn’t your fault.”
“How do you know?” she asked as she stared glumly down at their entwined fingers.
“Because I know you.”
That simple answer caused the tears that’d been lurking just below the surface all day to well up again. Guilt and doubt ate at her constantly, especially on long nights like this one, when she was prone to blame herself for the divorce, too. After all, she’d known from the beginning that she didn’t love Ace nearly enough to make that kind of commitment. She’d just been grateful someone wanted her, and that smacked so much of her mother it made her sick. “I wish I would’ve wised up sooner,” she said softly. “You’d never expect...never think...that someone you know and like...”
He squeezed her hand. “You had no clue and you put a stop to what she was doing as soon as you learned.”
That wasn’t good enough. She’d been too late for one child, and she didn’t know if she could live with that. She wanted to tell him so, but the words jammed up in her throat.
Desperate not to allow herself to lean on Mack for the emotional support her own husband hadn’t been able to give her, she pulled her hand away under the guise of wiping an errant tear. “We had to call an ambulance to my office four times in the first eight months my practice was open.”
“I’m guessing that’s a high number of emergencies?”
“For dealing with routine office visits, yes. I kept racking my brain for the cause. At first, I thought it might be a strange allergen from the tenant improvements. We had new carpet and paint put in when I leased the space. After I ruled that out, I thought maybe a weird virus was going around, and we were unwittingly passing it from one child to the next because our cleaning service wasn’t being thorough enough. So I started sterilizing the place myself every night, which only put me home later and caused that much more friction between Ace and me. I never dreamed what was happening could be purposeful, that it could be Maxine. She seemed so nice, so normal, so innocent. She’d cry whenever we had something go wrong, and I would have to comfort her!”
“That’s evil,” he mumbled. “How was she doing it?”
“She was using a muscle relaxant, one that’s effective in small doses and very hard to detect, and that would send the child into cardiac arrest.”
“Where was she getting it?”
“From my own medicine stash, which is even more disturbing. But the closet was locked, and I was the only one with a key. Plus, I checked those shelves constantly. None of the medications appeared to have been tampered with and none were missing.”
“So what was going on?”
“She’d stolen my key, had her locksmith roommate make a copy of it and replaced it before I even noticed. He testified in court that he duplicated it for her because she said she needed it—didn’t even question why. My attorney thinks he was hoping to curry favor with her, thinking he might get lucky.”
“But you said none of the medications were missing.”
“They didn’t appear to be missing. Succinylcholine is a clear liquid that comes in a vial. She’d used a syringe to draw it out before filling the vial back up with water. It wasn’t until after the Grossmans lost their eighteen-month-old daughter that I overheard a Dateline episode Ace was watching about a nurse who killed his love interest with the same thing.” Her stomach hurt as she remembered that night. “It was late, and I was trying to clean up the kitchen. I hadn’t been to work in several days. After Amelia, I closed the practice for a week, couldn’t even go in. But I got in the car that night, drove over to my office and tore that closet apart using a magnifying glass to examine every bottle and package. That’s when I found the needle marks.”