Florence Branch has been a midwife for over fifteen years, and never has she seen a family like this one. The child, a beautiful little girl by the name of Elizabeth, is no different from any other infant she has seen – perhaps even slightly too sickly to be counted among the majority of the rest. The mother, even, would not have been cause for such discomfort – plain, soft-spoken, and too weak to move from her bed.
It is the son that puts such fears into her heart.
As a midwife, Florence likes to think she has developed rather sharp instincts. She is not in the habit of ignoring something she knows is wrong, and something is wrong with that child.
She was paid for two weeks, and had thought the pay had included care of the Riddle's other child – but the father told her that under no circumstances should she enter that boy's room.
He stays locked up in the bedroom for the entirety of her two-week stay, emerging only for two Sunday dinners with his father. It feels like a cursed room, every time she passes by that door.
She is all too glad to leave, and she does not once look back.
Something is wrong with the young Riddle, and her instincts have never yet been mistaken.