My breath caught as she continued explaining that Emma refused to speak but wrote notes describing how her grandfather locked her inside a freezing basement storage room whenever she cried. The child also wrote that her mother had gone out with her grandmother that evening and left her alone with the old man.
I felt my chest tighten as the truth slowly formed, because my wife had insisted her mother needed help with health problems and that was why they stayed at her parents’ house so often. Julia then added that Emma had secretly recorded voice messages on her tablet in case something terrible happened to her.
During the flight I listened to the recordings through headphones while tears blurred the airplane window beside me. In one recording my daughter whispered that she was hungry because she had been denied dinner after spilling juice, and in another she said her arm hurt because her grandfather grabbed her too hard.
The final message was recorded shortly before she escaped and her tiny voice trembled as she said, “If someone finds this recording please tell Daddy I love him and tell him I tried to be good.”