Chapter 4: The Documentation
Detective Reyes arrived with two other officers twenty-two minutes later.
I know the exact time because I counted.
I had nothing else to do but stand near the window — the same window where Patrice had first seen me — and count the minutes while Lorraine sat on the bed and Derek stood in the corner and none of us spoke.
When the knock came at the bottom of the stairs, Derek moved toward it automatically.
"Stay," Reyes had said on the phone.
He stayed.
One of the officers came up first.
Young.
He looked around the room — the dresser, the phone mount, the feeding tube coiled near the wall — and his expression didn't change, but his eyes moved carefully over everything.
"Ma'am." He looked at me.
"Are you able to walk?"
"Yes," I said.
"We'd like you to come downstairs."
I walked past Lorraine without looking at her.
Past Derek without looking at him.
Down the narrow stairs that I had not been permitted to descend alone in eleven weeks.
The living room felt enormous.
Detective Reyes was a small woman with short gray hair and the kind of stillness that comes from having seen most things.
She looked at me the way Patrice had looked at me through the window — directly, without pity, which was exactly what I needed.
"Are you injured?" she asked.
"No."
"Are you in pain?"
"I'm twenty-nine weeks pregnant and I've been in that room for eleven weeks.
So yes.
But nothing acute."
She nodded.
"We have a paramedic outside.
I'd like her to check you before we do anything else."
"I want to know about the documentation first," I said.
"Lorraine said they have medical records.
Signed by Derek's physician.
Saying I have a psychiatric condition."
Reyes looked at me steadily.
"What's the physician's name?"
"I don't know.
I was never told."
"Do you have a psychiatric history?"
"No.
I've never been treated for anything.
I've never been evaluated.
I've never signed anything consenting to an evaluation."
"Then those records," Reyes said, "are either fabricated or obtained fraudulently.
Either way, that's a separate charge." She paused.
"How long have you been in that room?"
"Eleven weeks."
"Were you free to leave?"
I thought about how to answer that.
I thought about the first week, when Derek had said it was just until I felt better.
The second week, when Lorraine had taken my phone for safekeeping.
The third week, when the lock appeared on the outside of the door and Lorraine explained it was for my own protection, in case I sleepwalked.
"No," I said.
"I was not free to leave."
Reyes wrote something down.
"The stream," I said.
"Patrice — the woman who gave me the phone — she has everything.
Three weeks of footage.
Timestamps.
The comments.
She was going to send it to—"
"We've already been in contact with her," Reyes said.
"She called us two weeks ago.
We've been building the case since then."
I stared at her.
"We needed to wait until we had enough," Reyes said.
"I'm sorry it took as long as it did."
I didn't say anything.
I wasn't sure what I felt.
Relief was there, somewhere, but it was buried under eleven weeks of other things and it would take time to reach it.
"There's something else," Reyes said.
She glanced toward the stairs.
"The unknown number that called your husband's phone tonight — that was us.
We wanted to see how he would respond."
"He put it on speaker," I said.
"He did." She closed her notebook.
"That's going to matter."
Upstairs, I heard Lorraine's voice rise sharply, then cut off.
Then I heard Derek say, very quietly, "I know."
May you like
I didn't know what question he was answering.
But I heard it the way you hear a door close in a house you used to live in — final, and from a distance, and not entirely without grief.
