Chapter 1 — The Shout

The first thing I heard, surfacing out of five days of fever and mud, was a young man’s voice cracking with horror somewhere above me.

“Why are there live larvae inside this woman’s wound?!”

I could not open my eyes.

I could barely feel my own body.

But even half-drowned in exhaustion, some professional part of me, the part that never fully switches off, registered the panic in that voice and thought, with what strength I had left, because I put them there, and if you rip them out now you may cost me my leg. I could not make my mouth form the words.

They told me the rest later, the nurses and the surgeon, once I could listen.

How I had come in caked in dried marsh mud, barely conscious, my lips split, seven months pregnant, a filthy makeshift bandage lashed around my right thigh.

How no one could work out how I was still alive.

And how the young resident, uncovering my leg, had shouted and knocked over a stool, and a nurse had put her hand to her mouth and hurried out of the bay.

What none of them understood, in those first frantic minutes, was the one detail that would eventually explain everything: that the larvae were gathered only over the dead and damaged tissue, and nowhere else.

That was not an accident.

But I am getting ahead of myself, and to make sense of a woman found half-buried in a Louisiana swamp with her own wound crawling, you have to go back five days, to a pickup truck and a decision I made about a road.

Chapter 2 — Sixteen Years

Five days earlier, I had been driving my old truck toward home with exactly one person on my mind: my mother.

We had not spoken in sixteen years.

The call had come a week before that, from Mrs.

Collins, who had lived next door to my mother my whole childhood and had somehow found my number after all this time.