Wake Up, Lila
Chapter 01 - Wake Up, Lila
Eleanor Whitcomb climbed the stairs at ten forty-seven on a Sunday morning, carrying a wooden stick she'd kept beside the kitchen door since the day she first moved into this house thirty-one years ago.
She didn't intend to use it on anyone. She never had. It was simply part of her, the way reading glasses on a chain were part of other women her age, a prop that communicated a specific kind of authority without ever needing to actually demonstrate it.
She was furious, which was not unusual for Eleanor on any given morning, but was particularly sharp today because the girl her son had married less than eighteen hours ago was still in bed at nearly eleven o'clock, on the first full day of her life as a Whitcomb, behaving as though the name came without obligations.
Eleanor had been awake since five thirty. She'd made breakfast for eight people, cleared the remaining wedding decorations from the front hall, supervised Margaret as she put away the good china, and managed three phone calls from relatives still lingering in town, all before the coffee had finished brewing.
Her new daughter-in-law hadn't emerged once.
"Enough," Eleanor muttered, reaching the landing.
She pushed open the bridal bedroom door without knocking, because knocking was a courtesy Eleanor extended to guests and Lila was no longer a guest. She was family now, which meant she was subject to the specific, exacting standards Eleanor applied to everyone who carried the Whitcomb name.
"Wake up, Lila," she called sharply, striding toward the bed. "It's almost eleven."
The room was dim, curtains still drawn, soft daylight pushing weakly through the fabric. The bed was a tangle of white sheets, and Lila was a pale shape beneath them, motionless, her long dark hair spread across the pillow like something spilled.
Eleanor reached the bedside in four decisive steps. She gripped the edge of the blanket and pulled it back in one sharp motion, already composing the lecture she intended to deliver about responsibility, punctuality, and the specific expectations that came with marrying into a family like hers.
"Enough of this laziness—"
The words died in her mouth.
The sheets beneath Lila were soaked dark red, a stain that spread from beneath her hips across nearly half the mattress, and Lila herself lay on her side, nightgown twisted around her legs, face the color of candle wax, lips dry, eyes closed, her breathing so shallow that Eleanor couldn't immediately confirm she was breathing at all.
"Oh God," Eleanor whispered.
The wooden stick slipped from her fingers and clattered against the hardwood floor, the sound cracking through the silent room like something breaking that would never fully go back together.
Eleanor's hands moved before her mind had finished catching up. She touched Lila's shoulder, shook her gently, then pressed two trembling fingers against the side of the girl's throat, searching for a pulse she was suddenly, terrifyingly uncertain she would find.
"Lila," she said, voice dropping to something unrecognizable, the sharp, commanding tone of thirty seconds ago replaced entirely by the specific, raw frequency of genuine fear. "Can you hear me?"
Lila didn't respond. But the pulse was there, faint, thin, irregular, present beneath Eleanor's fingers like a thread being held by someone who might let go at any moment.
Eleanor's eyes, scanning the bedside table with the frantic efficiency of a woman looking for anything that might explain what she was seeing, landed on two objects sitting side by side next to an untouched glass of water.
The first was a small folded paper. She picked it up with hands that were shaking so hard she nearly dropped it twice, unfolded it, and read the single word printed across the test result's window.
Positive.
"Pregnant," Eleanor breathed.
She stared at the paper, at the blood-soaked sheets, at her son's wife lying motionless with a pulse barely strong enough to register, and understood, all at once, that whatever had happened in this room overnight was not laziness, was not dramatics, was not the behavior of a spoiled young woman sleeping past a reasonable hour.
Something was genuinely, terrifyingly wrong.
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Eleanor turned toward the bedroom door, clutching the test result in one hand, her composure finally, completely collapsing into the specific, desperate panic of a woman who understood she might be watching someone die.
"Adrian!" she screamed. "Get up here now!"
