“Someone in your hospital helped cover it up.”
She closed her eyes briefly. “Yes.”
You should have felt vindicated, but grief is a strange country. Truth does not cancel pain. It just gives it sharper edges. Sitting there in that cold room, you realized the past had not been rewritten. It had been robbed, and now the thieves were returning pieces one by one, expecting you to survive the weight of getting them back.
Ruiz handed you a business card. “We’d like you to stay available. Ava is being brought in for questioning. We have enough for probable cause on evidence tampering and unlawful access, but the homicide charge will depend on motive and corroboration.”
“Motive,” you repeated. “She murdered a newborn, and you still need motive?”
His expression did not harden, which made him seem more honest. “We need to prove it in a courtroom, not just in our bones.”
That night, you sat in your apartment in Portland with every light turned on.
The place was small, clean, and carefully ordinary. The books on the shelves. The mug with the chipped handle. The knitted throw your therapist once said looked like proof that comfort could be handmade. For years, you had built your life like a quiet shelter, a place with no sharp corners, no dramatic shadows, nothing that reminded you of the life that collapsed. But now the walls felt temporary, like scenery in a play you had mistaken for home.
At 9:14 p.m., your phone rang.
Daniel.
