Chapter 12 - “I Needed to Know Before You Did”
Mom finally agreed to meet Rebecca and me with our attorney present.
No speeches.
No dramatic confession.
Just four people around a conference table and twenty-seven years of damage between us.
I put the clipboard down.
“What was supposed to happen at 2:30?”
Mom stared at it.
“The second alarm.”
“I know that. Why?”
She rubbed her thumb against her wedding ring.
“I calculated how long Emma had been outside during the episode at the lake.”
I remembered.
Two months earlier, Emma's monitor had alarmed during a family picnic.
Twenty-eight minutes in extreme heat.
Mom had used that event as a baseline.
The porch had been an experiment.
She expected the first alert.
Then she expected a stronger second alert around the same exposure time.
She planned to photograph the readings and compare them.
“If the timing matched,” she said, “I thought it proved heat was causing everything.”
Rebecca stared at her.
“You chained an eight-year-old child because you were scared of genetic test results?”
“I needed to know before Daniel did.”
There it was again.
Control.
I leaned forward.
“You didn't need to know first. You needed to control what I knew.”
Mom's eyes filled.
“I watched your father die knowing I'd helped him hide something that could be inside you.”
“And your solution was to hide it from me too?”
She couldn't answer.
Then I asked the only question left.
“If Mrs. Gable hadn't been home, when were you going to release Emma?”
Mom looked at the clipboard.
“After the second alarm.”
May you like
Rebecca pushed her chair away.
For the first time, even my mother seemed to hear how monstrous that sounded.
