Chapter 10 - The Second Injector
The second injector was found Friday morning.
Not in Evelyn’s house.
Not in her car.
In Michael’s office.
He looked physically sick when Collins showed him where it had been discovered: inside the storage box he had taken from Evelyn’s home.
Michael swore he had never seen it.
Then Collins reconstructed the timeline.
Three weeks before Lily’s hospitalization, Michael confronted Evelyn after seeing the Cedar Grove questions.
He threatened to tell me.
Evelyn convinced him she had abandoned the idea.
To prove it, she gave him the box of paperwork and told him to destroy it.
He didn’t.
He stored it at work.
The second injector had been inside all along.
Michael’s silence suddenly meant something different.
Evelyn had not merely relied on his loyalty.
She had made him the unwitting custodian of evidence.
If investigators eventually discovered the injector with him, suspicion would spread.
The three clues aligned.
Her insistence that Michael help research Cedar Grove.
Her giving him the supposedly abandoned records.
Her repeated concern about Rachel’s guardianship preference.
Evelyn had been creating two narratives at once.
One in which I was a negligent father.
Another in which Michael was secretly helping remove Lily from my care.
Whichever man became inconvenient could be blamed.
Michael sat across from me afterward.
“I thought I was protecting Mom from doing something stupid.”
“You were protecting yourself from admitting she already had.”
He nodded.
That was the first time I saw him cry.
Then Collins received another call.
Pharmacy records showed Evelyn had collected Lily’s replacement injectors using an old authorization still on file.
But she hadn’t collected two.
She had collected four over eight months.
Two remained unaccounted for.
The major question changed again.
This had not started with Sunday’s cake.
May you like
Evelyn had been testing how easily she could control Lily’s emergency medication for almost a year.
And we still didn’t know whether Lily had already been endangered before.
