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She started counting the dead. Then she realized she knew who was with them when they died.Dr. Laura Wolfe arrived at St. Brigid's Mercy Hospital in Morrow's Ford, Vermont, with shaking hands and a secret she has never confessed: a patient died in Milwaukee because she made a mistake, and a man she trusted altered the records to cover for her. She took the NICU posting because she needed to prove, to herself, that she deserved to be a doctor.Sister Gillian Frome has been at St. Brigid's for eleven years. She is sixty-one years old, Daughter of St. Elizabeth, and the most devoted nurse on the ward. She sits with the dying. She knows every family by name. She sings, very quietly, to the babies in their incubators.When baby Caleb Prescott dies on his twenty-second day of life, Laura begins keeping a notebook. Not because she suspects anything. Because she cannot stop counting. Four deaths. Eight. Seventeen. Twenty-three out of twenty-seven— everyone with Sister Frome at the bedside, or the last hand on the line.Three miles away, Joan Garrity— sixty-three years old, retired Burlington homicide detective— receives a letter. The letter is from Rebecca Halloran, a mother who lost her daughter at St. Brigid's twenty-two months ago, who has ALS and is running out of time. Rebecca has compared notes with four other bereaved families. She has found fifteen nearly identical condolence cards, all from Sister Frome, all opening with the same sentence, all closing with the same phrase:Your child's last friend. Joan has seen something like those letters before. Once. In a basement in Lowertown. In 1998.The working count, by the time the federal prosecution finishes, is ninety-two children. Across thirty-seven years. Across eleven hospitals. One nun.As Laura and Joan converge on the truth, Laura must also face the return of the man who falsified her record in Milwaukee, and the question of whether a woman who has been kept in medicine by a lie has any moral authority to expose a woman who believes she has been guided by God. In Morrow's Ford, everyone is carrying a secret. The question is which secrets cost lives.For readers of: Freida McFadden, Tess Gerritsen, Karin Slaughter, and the slow-burn institutional dread of Shutter Island."The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice Read more
