Chapter 3 — The Strip of Tape

Amparo went to the kitchen to make herself something to settle her stomach, and Inmaculada, alone, began to move slowly around the cell the girl had just described — and that was when she saw it, white against the dark stone floor beside the cot.

It was a strip of medical tape, the kind used to hold a dressing or secure a line at a hospital.

It was clean.

Recent.

And when she lifted it to her face, it carried the faint, unmistakable smell of hospital alcohol — a smell that had no business in a sleeping cell in a cloistered convent where the nearest infirmary supply was locked in a cabinet three corridors away.