Chapter 10 - WHAT BUNNY COULD NOT SAY
The child advocacy center did not look like the place I had imagined. There were no gray interrogation rooms, no uniformed officers pacing the hallway, and no fluorescent lights buzzing above hard metal chairs. There was a play area with wooden blocks, a wall painted with enormous sunflowers, and a little sign explaining to parents that the interviewers would listen without expecting children to answer every question.
Lily chose the sunflower chair immediately. Bunny occupied the one beside it.
A specialist named Tessa introduced herself and showed Lily where I would wait. She asked permission to speak with my daughter privately, explaining in simple language what would happen and that Lily could ask for a break. We had prepared with Dr. Patel over the previous week, but I still wanted to carry Lily home rather than watch her step into another room without me.
“Will you stay?” she asked.
“Right outside.”
“Can Bunny go?”
“Bunny is the guest of honor.”
She considered that arrangement and followed Tessa. I sat with my elbows on my knees, staring at a child’s painting of a purple whale. A detective was nearby, and the session would be documented according to the center’s procedures. I knew that was necessary. It did nothing to quiet the part of me that kept hearing Lily’s voice at dinner.
Hannah had come for support. She watched me twist my wedding ring, which I still wore on a chain only because I had not known what to do with it. She reached across and unclasped the chain.
“You don’t have to decide what to do with this today,” she said. “But you also don’t have to keep touching it like a punishment.”
She slipped it into her purse for safekeeping. I was grateful for the simple mercy of someone handling a practical problem while I could barely think.
The interview lasted less than an hour. When Lily emerged, she looked tired and asked for a sandwich. She did not volunteer a dramatic revelation. She wanted grape jelly and to know whether there was a fish tank in the waiting room. Tessa spoke to us afterward, emphasizing that the child’s well-being remained the priority and that the formal account would be reviewed by investigators rather than repeated for family members.
Cole later told me that Lily’s account was consistent with the hallway footage on key points. She had described the laundry room, Bunny being taken away, and Sarah’s photograph disappearing. She also spoke about being frightened of an unfamiliar blinking light near her bookshelf. The investigators had already recovered that device, so the information did not need to stand alone.
“What if the defense makes her talk in court?” I asked.
“There are procedures that may reduce or eliminate that need,” Cole said. “The prosecutor will evaluate them. No one can promise a particular outcome today.”
I disliked the answer. I trusted it.
On the way home, Lily announced she wanted pancakes for dinner because serious appointments deserved unserious food. I stopped at a grocery store for blueberries and whipped cream. She directed the operation from her car seat, listing the toppings Bunny had supposedly requested. When we pulled into the driveway, my mother was standing on the porch with a mixing bowl already in her arms. Hannah had called ahead.
That night we ate pancakes beneath the dining-room chandelier where Lily had accused Meredith six weeks earlier. The same table looked different with crayon drawings scattered among the plates. Lily decided Bunny was allowed whipped cream only in theory, because rabbits were famously messy eaters. My mother laughed until she cried. It was the first dinner in weeks that did not feel like we were waiting for a catastrophe.
The catastrophe arrived by email instead. Meredith’s attorney filed documents questioning how I had collected and shared the original footage before police seized the devices. He alleged that my anger might have influenced the recording I presented. Another filing challenged whether the older files found on the card could reliably be tied to Melissa Hart. Cole told me the prosecution had anticipated these issues, but she needed me to preserve the original phone, the app account, and the messages I had sent Hannah on the night of the dinner.
I went to my office and searched through every backup I could find. The security system had automatically uploaded event clips to an account I hadn’t opened in months. There was a purchase receipt for the hallway camera, an installation invoice, and a technician’s email documenting the device serial numbers. I forwarded everything to the investigators through the method they specified.
Then Hannah showed me something I had forgotten. On the night of the dinner, I had handed her the phone while I carried Lily upstairs. She had taken one screenshot of the footage’s timestamp and immediately texted it to our mother so Rose would know exactly why we were calling police. The message retained its original date and context, one more piece of a timeline nobody had needed to invent.
“Do you remember what you said that night?” Hannah asked.
“Probably something stupid.”
“You said, ‘I keep wanting it to be less bad than it is.’”
I stared at the screenshot. Hannah put her hand on my shoulder.
“You’re not required to make this easier to look at,” she said.
The next morning Nina, the wedding guest, agreed to provide a formal statement about the insurance account. Her lawyer supplied messages showing Meredith had asked her to receive verification emails and then instructing her to delete their conversation. Nina had kept copies because the requests made her uneasy. She also had a photograph from the wedding rehearsal taken at the exact moment Meredith was using Nina’s laptop to complete an online form.
The photograph alone proved little. Combined with account logs and Nina’s messages, it offered investigators a new path to identify who had submitted the forged application.
I thanked Hannah for saving the old text and went upstairs. Lily had arranged a row of toy animals along the dresser beneath Sarah’s photograph. Bunny stood at the front, a new purple felt cape tied around his shoulders. My daughter told me he was no longer in charge of guarding doors.
“What’s his job now?” I asked.
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“He listens when somebody has a bad day.”
I sat on the floor beside her and thought about all the adults who had finally learned to do the same. The next morning Cole called again: the Nevada team had located Sofia Delgado, and the sixteen-year-old had asked to speak with an investigator. She remembered a woman named Renee—and an envelope that might explain why her father’s death had made her disappear from her own home.
