Chapter 3 - Dad Comes Home
My father was named Daniel Miller.
Forty-two.
Hospital facilities manager.
He had been working late.
My biological mother died when I was nine.
Daniel married Valerie four years later.
Leo was their child.
Which meant Valerie was not attacking somebody else’s baby.
She was attacking her own son.
Dad arrived at the hospital before midnight.
He saw Leo first.
Then me.
Then the bruise darkening around my shoulder.
“What happened?”
I told him.
He listened without interrupting.
When I repeated Valerie’s sentence about Leo’s blindness, Dad’s face changed.
He sat.
Put both hands over his mouth.
Then said:
“I knew she was angry.”
I stared.
“What?”
“Not like this.”
“What did you know?”
“She thought the appointments were too much.”
That was the first thread.
There would be many.
A detective arrived.
Asked about the nursery.
Asked about the bat.
The lamp.
Then:
“There’s a camera above the crib.”
“The baby monitor,” Dad said.
“Was it on?”
I answered first.
“No. Valerie unplugged it.”
The detective looked at Dad.
“Does unplugging it stop recording immediately?”
Dad frowned.
Then his eyes widened.
“No.”
I turned.
“What?”
“It has a backup battery.”
Silence.
“How long?”
“Maybe half an hour.”
The detective asked:
“Local storage?”
“Yes.”
Dad looked physically sick.
“There’s a microSD card.”
The detective stood.
Police returned to the house.
The camera’s power cord was hanging from the wall.
Exactly as I remembered.
The card remained inside.
May you like
Valerie had unplugged the monitor.
She had not necessarily turned it off.
