The smell was faint. If I had not spent years in pediatric home care, I might have ignored it. Sweet. Almost like vanilla. But underneath it was something sharper. Synthetic.
I stepped closer to the seam where the baseboard met the shared drywall between Leo and Maya’s bedrooms. In the quiet corridor of the Vance home, the late-afternoon sun fell across the polished maple floorboards in long, amber slats, illuminating microscopic motes of dust that drifted aimlessly. Everything about this house projected clean lines, wealth, and order. Yet here, hovering between the two identical closed doors, was an odor that simply did not belong. It reminded me of cheap imitation extract spilled over a hot battery—cloying, artificial, and faint enough to be dismissed as a phantom memory by anyone whose senses had not been honed on sterile units and high-acuity home visits.
I knelt. My uniform trousers pulled taut against my knees as I pressed my nose toward the narrow threshold.
