The forensic investigation moved fast, and in forty-eight hours it confirmed everything my hands and my thirty years had already told me.

The coroner’s report was plain: my daughter had not died of any natural cause.

There had been a drug in her blood that had no business being anywhere near her body — a lethal amount of it, the kind of finding that ends a conversation about heart failure the instant it appears on the page.

And the marks on her throat had been made before she died, not after, which meant she had been alive for them, which meant she had fought.

I have made myself stop imagining that part.