The answer came so softly that for half a second I wondered if I had heard Elaine correctly.
“I told her to sit down and stop performing.”
The paramedic beside Lily looked up.
The officer did not move.
Neither did I.
My seven-year-old daughter sat on the edge of the ambulance stretcher with a nebulizer mask covering her mouth and nose, her small chest still rising too fast beneath her pink T-shirt.
Elaine stood ten feet away in her church cardigan, facing an officer whose body camera was recording every word.
“You believed she was pretending she couldn’t breathe?” he asked.
Elaine crossed her arms.
“She gets worked up when she doesn’t get her way.”
The officer glanced toward Lily.
“Did she tell you she needed her prescribed inhaler?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew where it was?”
Elaine’s eyes flicked toward the clear evidence bag in the second officer’s hand.
