PART 2

Chloe stepped forward, irritated by his sudden silence. “Julian, throw it in the trash and tell her to leave. We have a car picking us up at dawn.”

Julian didn’t move. The color had drained completely from his neck and jaw.

“Answer me, Nora,” he said, his voice dropping to a harsh rasp. “Did you feed her this? Did the nurses put this in her head?”

“Maya was conscious for forty minutes while the trauma team prepped her,” I answered calmly. “She asked for my pencil and my layout paper. I stayed by the curtain. Nobody spoke to her except the anesthesiologist.”

On the drafting sheet, Maya hadn’t just drawn a childish get-well picture. She had used my scale grid to sketch the broken balcony railing from Julian’s house—complete with an exact quotation written inside a speech bubble.

Chloe tried to snatch the paper from Julian’s hand. “Give me that. What could a nine-year-old possibly—”

Julian jerked the paper out of her reach, his eyes fixed on the final two sentences scrawled at the bottom margin:

“Daddy, I heard what Chloe told you right before the wood broke. You said…”