PART 2: Naomi

Naomi Chen had been my friend since university.

She was also the most methodical person I had ever known, which was why she had become a family lawyer and why I had called her at 1:14 in the morning from a hotel room in Columbus while my daughter slept with her bald head pressed against my arm.

She answered on the second ring.

“Joanna,” she said. “Talk.”

I talked.

She listened without interrupting, which was one of the things I valued most about her — she collected information before she responded to it, which was the opposite of what most people did.

When I finished, she said: “The camera footage is the foundation. Everything else builds from it.”

“I’ve saved it in three places,” I said.

“Good. Send me the originals tonight. Don’t edit anything. Don’t clip anything. Send the full recording from the past week.”

I sent it while we were still on the phone.

“Elmer’s message,” she said. “The one telling you to come back and apologize.”

“I have it,” I said. “I screenshotted it before I blocked him.”

“Perfect,” she said. “That message, combined with Walter hitting you and Louisa’s condition, establishes a pattern. This isn’t a domestic dispute. This is a crime scene.”

I looked at Louisa’s head in the dim light of the hotel room.

She had stopped flinching in her sleep.

She had spent most of the evening flinching at sounds.

“What do I do first?” I said.

“Tomorrow morning,” Naomi said. “Hospital first. Have a doctor document Louisa’s condition — the scalp, any marks on her body, her emotional state. Get photographs taken by the medical staff. Then police station. You file the report for both Louisa and yourself.”

“Walter hit me,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “How is your lip?”

“Swollen,” I said. “It stopped bleeding.”

“Photograph it now,” she said. “Time-stamped. Send me the photos.”

I took the photographs in the bathroom mirror.

The split lip.

The beginning of bruising along my jaw.

I sent them.

“Joanna,” Naomi said.

“Yes,” I said.

“You got out,” she said. “With Louisa. With your documents and your savings card. You did everything right.”

“I left her there for a week,” I said.

“You didn’t know,” Naomi said.

“I should have known,” I said.

“You trusted your husband’s family with your daughter,” she said. “That is a reasonable thing to do. What they did with that trust is on them. Not on you.”

I looked at Louisa.

Three years old.

Asleep with her stuffed bunny.

Bald and flinching in her sleep.

“Heather framed a three-year-old,” I said.

“Yes,” Naomi said. “And the camera shows it from beginning to end.”

“They held her down,” I said.

“I watched the footage,” Naomi said. Her voice was very level. “I watched all of it. It’s going to be important evidence and it is also one of the most difficult things I have seen in fourteen years of family law.”

I did not say anything.

“Sleep if you can,” she said. “I’ll have the initial filings ready by morning. The custody question is going to move quickly given Elmer’s message.”

“He chose them,” I said.

“His message is documented,” she said. “A father who responds to his child’s abuse by telling the mother to apologize has made a position clear.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Sleep,” she said again.

I put the phone down.

I lay beside Louisa in the hotel bed and listened to her breathe.

She was still breathing like someone who was afraid.

Short. Watchful. Even in sleep.

I stroked the back of her head.

She had three-year-old’s hair. Soft and fine and dark like mine.

Had.

I held her hand until her breathing slowed.

Then I lay in the dark hotel room and thought about what Naomi had said.

You got out.

Yes.

I had gotten out.

Now came everything else.

PART 3: The Hospital

Dr. Reeves was a pediatric physician who had been in practice for twenty-two years.

She examined Louisa with the specific gentleness of someone who had examined frightened children before and knew that gentleness was not only kindness but technique.

Louisa sat on the examination table holding her bunny.

She had not spoken much since the hotel.

She had answered yes and no questions but had not offered anything voluntarily, which was not like her.