Chapter 4

I instantly realized my husband didn’t believe a word I was saying.

Panic surged through me.

“You have to believe me. I’m not making this up! You’re in the class group chat too, aren’t you?”

I fumbled with my phone and switched back to the messaging app.

“You muted the group, right? Go check it! The messages are all there. That’s proof!”

I heard him tapping through his phone.

“Check what? You’re the only one in there going crazy about ghosts. All the other parents have been telling you that you’re just overly anxious because David only recently started preschool.

“And if you hadn’t kept calling Ms. Watson over and over and distracting her, the bus wouldn’t have crashed in the first place!”

But I immediately caught the most important part of what he’d said.

“The bus crashed? Where are the kids now? At the hospital?”

The moment he confirmed it, I slammed on the brakes, made a U-turn, and raced toward the hospital.

The second I arrived, Vivian’s mom slapped me across the face.

“Are you insane? Why did you keep calling Ms. Watson? If anything happens to Vivian, I swear I’ll never forgive you!”

The slap left me stunned.

“That’s not what happened,” I stammered. “I saw it through the camera. I sent the video to the group. Didn’t any of you see it?”

Vivian’s mom shoved her phone in front of me.

“Since last night, you’ve been ranting about ghosts at the preschool. We figured you were just anxious, so we spent half the night trying to calm you down. And you’re still not done?

“You even put a hidden camera on your kid. The footage clearly shows nothing unusual, yet you’re still making things up.”

Frowning, I opened the video.

My blood ran cold.

The three minutes when the children had sat perfectly still were now completely different.

In this version, Ms. Watson had suggested a pretend-sleeping game because she was worried the excited children would wear out their voices from shouting.

Vivian hadn’t leaned halfway out the window either.

She had simply been hanging over the back of her seat.

“That’s impossible...” My voice shook. “Am I really losing my mind?”

“You need treatment.”

Luther arrived just then and reached for me, his voice gentle as he tried to pull me into his arms.

I instinctively stepped away from him.

At that moment, the doors to the operating room opened, and I hurried over.

Thankfully, Vivian wasn’t in any life-threatening danger.

But when I saw the cut on her lower leg, doubt immediately crept back in.

It was clearly a cut from broken glass.

And I remembered exactly where she had been injured when Ms. Watson yanked her back through the bus window.

Luther frowned and told me the cut had come from glass that shattered during the crash.

Under the hostile stares of the other parents, I mechanically wrapped my arms around David as he came running toward me.

Then I instinctively checked him all over for injuries.

That was when I saw the yellow button clenched in his palm.

My mind went blank.

I remembered it clearly.

While I was watching the hidden camera feed, David had been crying and begging the driver to stop because he needed to pee.

In the commotion, he had torn a button off Ms. Watsons’s clothes.

I whipped around and stared at her.

Then I froze.

One of the buttons on her clothes was missing.

This wasn’t a hallucination.

I hadn’t imagined any of it.

If the video I was looking at now was fake, then why was Ms. Watson really missing the exact button David had pulled off?

A terrifying possibility took shape in my mind.

Ignoring everyone around me, I held David tightly against me and opened the hidden camera app.

I dragged the progress bar back and forth again and again.

Finally, I stopped on a frame showing the children’s blank eyes fixed on something outside the bus window.

My fingers trembled.

“I know who that strange teacher in white the children keep talking about is.”