My daughter stood behind me with the walker.
Then she said, “That’s not what happened.”
Her stepmother’s face changed.
Not anger.
Fear.
And that was when I understood the part I had missed.
The walker had not been the whole story.
It had been evidence of a pattern.
She had not simply been making decisions about how my daughter moved around the house. She had been creating her own version of what happened when I was not there.
And she had been keeping records of it.
I looked down at the list again.
Then I looked at my daughter.
“Did you ever see her write these?”
My daughter nodded.
“Where?”
“In the bedroom.”
“What else did she write?”
My daughter hesitated.
“She wrote that I was getting worse.”
The words made my chest tighten.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Her stepmother stepped forward.
“You don’t understand what I was trying to do.”
