“She told her sisters last week that Aunt Danielle sleeps over when Mommy works.

Blake realized the children were going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person and ruin the whole narrative before the legal paperwork was ready.

So he needed her quiet.

He needed her contained.”

That was the moment my fear turned, completely and permanently, into something else.

Not hysteria.

Rage — but a cold, clean, directed rage, the kind that does not cloud your judgment but sharpens it to a point.

Because I understood, now, the true reason my daughter had been on that floor.