Chapter 16 - The Paper Trail|
Ten minutes later, the front entryway was filled with four uniformed police officers and two paramedics.
While the paramedics attended to Emma upstairs—replacing her medication and ensuring her surgical incision hadn't ruptured—I sat at the dining room table with Officer Ramirez, reviewing the continuous cellular footage recorded on my phone.
Officer Ramirez watched the screen with a grim, tight expression.
When the video showed Vivian scattering the crushed pills across the floorboards and forcing my bleeding wife to crawl toward our screaming son, the officer paused the tape, turned to his partner, and nodded once.
“That’s open-and-shut domestic abuse, prescription tampering, and child endangerment,” Ramirez stated firmly.
Behind us, in the hallway, another officer clicked heavy steel handcuffs around Vivian’s wrists.
She didn't fight back physically. She stood limply between the officers, her eyes dull and hollow, staring at the floorboards as if her entire reality had dissolved into thin air.
As they led her out toward the police cruiser, my father’s sedan pulled wildly into the driveway, tires screeching against the asphalt.
My father, Arthur, threw his door open and stumbled out into the lawn. He looked exhausted, pale, his suit jacket rumpled from his emergency flight home.
He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw his wife of twenty-eight years being placed into the back of a police car in handcuffs.
“What... what is happening here?” Arthur gasped, looking wildly around the lawn until his eyes landed on me and Natalie standing on the porch. “Daniel! Natalie! What is going on?!”
Natalie stepped down off the porch, holding the yellow envelope.
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She didn't scream. She didn't cry. She walked right up to our father, stopped inches from his chest, and handed him the 8x10 photo of Sarah Miller holding baby me in the hospital bed.
“It’s time to wake up, Dad,” Natalie said softly.
