“Daddy told a man that everything was ready, and he said today was the day when it would all be finished.”
A cold wave of disbelief collided violently with maternal instinct inside my chest, because Derek and I had argued often about finances, stress, and the emotional distance that had grown between us, yet the idea of deliberate harm still felt too monstrous for immediate acceptance.
“Finished,” I repeated faintly, struggling to assemble meaning from a word that suddenly carried horrifying implications. “Finished what, Sadie?”
She stepped closer, her tiny hand gripping my wrist with desperate intensity, and I felt the dampness of her palm, the physical manifestation of terror no imagination could convincingly reproduce.
“He said it had to look like an accident so nobody would ever question anything.”
The sentence detonated inside my mind like an explosion that erased hesitation, doubt, and denial in one merciless instant, because whatever explanations once protected my perception of Derek’s behavior collapsed beneath the raw certainty of my daughter’s fear.