The report on the kitchen island was eighty pages long, bound in plastic, and stamped with the clean seal of an accredited environmental firm: All parameters within normal ambient limits.
Yet the twins were fading.
When I arrived that morning for my initial shift as their private night-duty nurse, Maya was asleep in her crib, her breathing shallow, her eyelids fluttering with the twitching, uncoordinated rapid eye movements of a brain struggling against a silent irritant. Her brother, Leo, was limp in his mother’s arms downstairs, barely tracking the yellow wooden duck Julian waved gently in front of his face. His pupils were sluggish. His skin had a faint, parchment-like translucence that made my stomach turn.
I stood up slowly, looking up and down the corridor.
The smell wasn’t in Leo’s room. I had spent forty minutes checking his monitors, inspecting his crib mattress, smelling the sheets, inspecting the humidifier.
