“For five hours?”

“That’s a gross exaggeration. She was out there an hour, at most.”

“We have the timestamp on your garage entry,” Daniel said. “We have the receipt from the bistro. And Alvarez is pulling the camera feeds from that pillar right now.”

The line went dead quiet. That silence — the absence of a comeback — was a louder confession than anything she could have said.

When she spoke again, the bluster was gone, replaced by something icy. “You’d really use strangers against your own mother?”

“You made my child unsafe,” Daniel said. “You started this.”