Chapter 2 - What Michael Already Knew
“Second injector?” I asked.
Evelyn closed her eyes.
That reaction frightened me more than anything she had said.
Michael exhaled through the speaker. “Don’t let Mom leave.”
Collins immediately asked where he was.
“At work.”
Michael managed a commercial insurance office in Dublin, twenty minutes from the hospital. He refused to explain further over the phone.
“I need to show Daniel something.”
Evelyn laughed once, bitterly.
“Of course you do.”
Michael hung up.
Collins separated Evelyn from us while a nurse checked Lily. Her allergic reaction had started at Evelyn’s house during a Sunday birthday lunch. Lily was severely allergic to tree nuts, something everyone in the family had known since kindergarten.
Evelyn claimed I had forgotten Lily’s emergency injector.
I had believed her because I’d been rushing that morning.
But I remembered putting it into Lily’s backpack.
Lily remembered something else.
“Grandma took my cake away,” she whispered. “Then she brought another piece.”
“What was different?”
“The frosting.”
She swallowed.
“She kept watching me eat.”
My stomach tightened.
Evelyn had recently begun criticizing how protective I was of Lily.
She wanted Lily staying overnight more often. I had refused because Evelyn sometimes treated her allergies as something she needed to “grow out of.”
Still, that didn’t explain forged paperwork.
Or Michael.
Detective Collins studied the document.
It wasn’t a custody order. It was an unsigned admission packet for Cedar Grove Behavioral Residence, a private facility that accepted children with serious behavioral and family-placement problems.
The form described Lily as emotionally unstable.
It described me as an overwhelmed widower unable to provide consistent supervision.
Someone had copied my signature onto a preliminary consent page.
Evelyn spoke from across the room.
“You work sixty hours a week, Daniel. Someone had to think about her future.”
Lily heard her.
Her small fingers tightened around mine.
May you like
Then she whispered something that made Collins stop writing.
“Grandma told Uncle Michael Daddy would finally agree after I got sick.”
