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crying made him spit up a lot. Megan knew she smelled like baby puke half the time.
    The books said if she reached her wit’s end, she should just leave the baby in his crib and let him cry—until she felt better. But how could she feel better while he was screaming like that? And she had her neighbors to think about, too. They hated her. Moving into this building, she’d made it her goal to remain anonymous. Well, not anymore. Thanks to Josh and his nightly scream-a-thons, everyone loathed the woman in 4-E.
    She’d gotten used to doing things with one hand while holding him. She set the fan on high, hoping the white noise would soothe him. Then she grabbed his yellow blankie with the cartoon giraffes on it, and covered him. Plopping down on her Ikea sofa, Megan rocked the screaming, squirming, and sweating little bundle in her arms, and prayed. “Please, God, make him stop. Please …”
    She should have gotten her money back on the home pregnancy test she’d taken ten months ago, the one that had come up negative. Her premonition about the blue smock in Dr. Amato’s office had been far more accurate. Indeed, she’d been with child, a boy—so she’d learned during the third ultrasound.
    At first, she’d dreaded the notion she might be pregnant. But once Megan realized she had new life growing inside her, everything changed. Suddenly, she didn’t feel so all alone in her crummy one-bedroom apartment by the Monorail. She had someone else to care about—a reason for starting all over again.
    Even with a husband, a beautiful, big house, and all their friends on Chicago’s North Shore, Mrs. Glenn Swann had felt a lot lonelier and aimless most of the time. She’d been far worse off.
    Mrs. Swann’s photo made page three of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on November 16, 1996—two days after Megan’s first visit to Dr. Amato. The photograph ran alongside a report about the Chicago-area Garbage Bag Murder case. Everyone was certain Glenn Swan had murdered his wife.
    The story ran on the national TV news that night, and they showed the same photo of the late Mrs. Swann. With a hand over her mouth, Megan watched the broadcast. She automatically glanced out her window to see TV lights flickering in the windows of the apartment buildings across the street. She wondered if those people were watching the same thing.
    For the next few days, Megan was afraid to set foot outside her apartment. She imagined Dr. Amato or his nurse or the receptionist seeing that photo in the Seattle paper. She thought of her neighbors in the building and people at Vine Street Gourmet who might think the dead Mrs. Glenn Swann looked terribly familiar. Every time she heard the elevator door open down the hall from her apartment, she thought it might be the police coming to get her. Every time the phone rang, her heart seemed to stop.
    Megan figured it was the type of story people would be talking about for quite some time: a prominent surgeon accused of murdering the wife he’d been abusing for over a year; her fake suicide scene on a high bridge over the Mississippi; the doctor reporting her missing when it seemed obvious he’d chopped her up, then left her body parts in garbage bags at various locations along Chicago’s North Shore. Megan had thought she would have to become a total recluse for months.
    Yet as sensational as the story was, Seattleites had had enough of the ongoing O. J. Simpson civil trial not to care about a somewhat similar, lower-profile case in the Chicago area. While each new development of the Garbage Bag Murder case was covered in the Chicago Tribune , which Megan still bought at the Pike Place Market newsstand, there wasn’t much in the Seattle newspapers about it again.
    They never did find Mrs. Glenn Swann’s head. And of course, they never would.
    If she’d been conflicted over letting Dr. Glenn Swann go to jail for his wife’s murder, Megan found the baby only strengthened her resolve to do nothing. After all,