She was on something to sleep.

The child had a nightmare and she’s confused, that’s all this is.” She said it so many times that I understood, somewhere in the middle of the worst day of my life, that she was not trying to convince the police.

She was rehearsing.

And the medical examiner’s first findings had already begun, quietly, to take her story apart — because a woman who simply slipped away in her sleep does not have the kind of injuries the examiner was documenting, the kind you only get fighting.

Chapter 7 — Under the Cushion

My father would not stop hitting the arm of his chair, and pointing, down, at the seat he was sitting on.

Someone finally understood him.

Novak crouched, lifted the edge of the cushion my father kept jabbing at, and ran his hand along the underside of the wheelchair frame — and came away with a small SD memory card, taped there, hidden, by a man who could not speak and could barely move and had still found a way to keep the one piece of evidence no one else knew existed.

My father looked at me while they bagged it, and his eyes were streaming, and he mouthed a shape I couldn’t read, and I put my hand over his ruined right hand and held it.

Later they asked him to tell it his own way, and he asked, with his good hand, for his letter board — the board my mother, it would turn out, had been hiding from visitors for weeks, telling everyone he’d gone simple.