Daniel had met Ava only months after Liam died. That was the official story, the one he and everyone else repeated with polished ease. You had heard she was elegant, charitable, impossibly composed. The kind of woman people described as effortless because they never looked closely enough to see the calculation underneath.
But this? This was not calculation. This was murder.
You pressed both palms to your mouth, not because you were about to cry, but because you were afraid something animal and broken might come out of you if you didn’t. For six years, you had carried the sentence Daniel gave you like a stone tied to your spine. Your genes defected. Your body failed. Your child died because something in you was wrong.
And all along, someone had poisoned your son.
“Why would she do that?” you asked finally.
The detectives exchanged a glance that bothered you more than any immediate answer could have.
“That,” Ruiz said carefully, “is what we’re still investigating.”
Dr. Ellis sat across from you with both hands wrapped around a paper cup she was not drinking from. Her eyes were raw, as if she had not slept since the audit exposed the falsified records. When she apologized, it was not the polished apology of an institution. It was the cracked, human kind. The kind that knew it was arriving six years too late to save anyone.
“We found discrepancies in medication logs during a digital migration,” she said. “Someone manually altered the original treatment notes and genetic consult request. The toxicology order was deleted before it could be processed. Then the case was sealed under neonatal complications.”
You looked at her, numb and burning at the same time.
