Margaret didn’t ask what was wrong. She calmly picked up the apple slices, transferred them to a bright blue plastic plate, and slid it across the counter. “I prefer the blue ones anyway,” she murmured, returning to her crossword puzzle.
I sat down, my hands shaking so violently I could barely hold the fruit.
The psychological whiplash was agonizing. At night, Margaret would knock gently on the doorframe of my room. “I’m going to read in the living room for an hour, Ava. You don’t need permission to come out. The whole house is yours.”
It took me ten days to finally step out of my room uninvited. When I crept into the living room, Margaret didn’t look up from her book. She simply shifted on the couch to make room. Later that night, when I went back to bed, I heard the muffled sound of her crying quietly at the kitchen sink. Stepping into a room freely shouldn’t require an act of monumental bravery, and it broke her heart that it did.
But my quiet sanctuary was soon invaded by the noise of the outside world. The criminal case was escalating, and the news had leaked to the press.
One afternoon, I came home from school to find Margaret sitting at the kitchen table, her face ashen, speaking in hushed tones to Karen Holloway and Detective Walsh. They stopped talking the moment I walked in.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, my old instincts flaring. I immediately looked down at the floor, preparing for a reprimand.
Detective Walsh sighed, pulling out a manila folder. “Ava, Thomas and Rebecca have hired a high-powered defense attorney. They are pleading not guilty. And based on what we found on the blog… the prosecutor thinks we might have to put you on the witness stand.”
Chapter 6: The Digital Trail
The air in Margaret’s kitchen vanished. The thought of sitting in a massive wooden chair, staring across a courtroom at the two people who had systematically dismantled my soul, made me physically nauseous.
“Why?” I whispered, my vision blurring. “You have the locks. You have the chart.”
“We do,” Walsh agreed, her voice laced with frustration. “But their defense strategy is vicious. They are going to claim that you were already deeply traumatized from your life before the adoption, and that their extreme methods were necessary disciplinary actions for a deeply disturbed child. They are trying to spin this to make themselves the victims.”
