Chapter 3
My daughter was born by emergency cesarean at eleven-fourteen that evening. She was four weeks early and her heart rate had been dropping by the time the surgical team had me on the table, and the neonatologist who met with me afterward said the word close in a way that I understood meant something more specific than close usually means. They named the unit she went to the NICU. They told me she was fighting. They told me she was small but that small was not the same as fragile, and I held that sentence during the hours I spent in recovery waiting to be moved to a room where I could see her, and I held it during the first night and the second day, and I held it like a fact I was not willing to release.
Ethan did not come to the hospital that night.
He did not come the next day.
On the morning of the second day, my attorney, a woman named Carol Reyes who had been recommended to me by the social worker assigned to my case while I was still in the recovery unit, sat beside my hospital bed with a folder and walked me through what had been filed and what was pending and what the 911 recording contained and what the body camera footage from the first officers on scene showed and what the blood evidence documentation from the hallway meant in the context of what I had described. She walked me through all of it in the same calm and specific voice she used for everything, and when she finished she put the folder on the bed beside me and said I had a choice to make about how to proceed and that whatever I chose she would support, but that the record was clear and the record was complete and the record was not going to go anywhere regardless of what I decided.
I told her to proceed.
She handed me the papers to review. I held them with both hands, in the hospital bed where I had spent two nights while my daughter breathed in a bassinet twenty feet away and my husband attended a birthday party and came home to an empty house with blood on the floor, and I read every page.
On the morning of the third day, Ethan and Patricia came to the hospital.
I heard them before I saw them, Patricia's voice in the hallway carrying the particular quality of a woman who has decided the situation requires her management, saying something to one of the nurses about a misunderstanding and family stress and how Madison had always been prone to making things larger than they were. I heard Ethan's voice, lower, and I could not make out the words but I recognized the tone, the tone of a man who has had two days to prepare a version of events and has arrived ready to deliver it.
The door opened.
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Ethan came in first. He was wearing a dark hoodie, not the charcoal suit, and his face had the expression of someone who has composed himself carefully and is maintaining the composition through effort. Patricia was a step behind him, her coat buttoned, her expression set in the particular way it set when she had decided she was being wronged.
They stopped when they saw the room.
