Again, I said yes.
Her expression changed slightly.
“We found references to that too.”
I looked at her.
“What were they planning?”
“We’re still establishing that.”
That answer frightened me more than a definite one would have.
Because it meant the investigators were still discovering pieces of something larger.
My husband had spent the entire emergency trying to make the incident sound smaller than it was. He had called it an accident. He had told the neighbor we were handling it. He had told the officer our daughter was confused.
But my daughter had remembered.
And she had said the sentence that broke through everything.
“Daddy told Grandma I still hadn’t learned.”
The detective told me that statement mattered because it connected the punishment to something that had happened before the chemical incident.
“What did she supposedly need to learn?” I asked.
The detective looked at me for a long moment.
