My fingers tightened on the paper. I looked at the empty wooden block where our spare set of keys usually hung.
I stared at the words she had written on the thick cardstock. My mother had sat at our dining table before I left, her voice firm and aristocratic, telling me she would handle everything. She told me to focus on the German pipeline project, promising that she and my sister Chloe would care for Maya and the newborn.
“Maya,” I called out, walking back to the bedroom doorway. “Where is the baby’s formula?”
“They took the boxes,” she said from beneath the quilt. “They said it would spoil if the power went out.”
“They took the baby’s formula?” I asked.
She nodded once, her teeth chattering.
I walked down the narrow hallway to the nursery. The room was tiny, barely big enough for a chest of drawers and the white wicker bassinet we had bought at an estate sale in Greenpoint.
