Forty-Eight Hours
The timeline. That the sedation of my daughter began in the December of 2023, fourteen months before the funeral home, at a low level, and that its original purpose was not to kill her.
Its original purpose was the video calls.
Two calls a week that had to be cancelled or managed.
A child who had started, at five, asking when she was going to see her mother.
A therapist’s letters that needed a child who presented as anxious about transitions.
It started as a way of managing a schedule.
Fourteen months.
The escalation. That in the November of last year, with the Beltran referral in the hands of a district attorney and two accounts frozen, Claudia raised the trust at a kitchen table, and that Natalia was present, and that the words used were, in her account, “there is a version of this where she is not here.”