Chapter 7
The investigation that followed moved with the particular, grinding thoroughness of a case that had gone from "concerning" to "attempted," and it did not stay contained to the cast.
Denise Okafor's team, working with the detective assigned to the case, pulled eleven months of financial records tied to the life insurance policy and found what people who plan things like this almost always leave behind: a trail. Marissa had researched wilderness first-aid courses eighteen months earlier — ostensibly for a hiking hobby she'd never actually taken up — and completed a module specifically on wound care and infection risk. She'd purchased the fly larvae, sourced from a specialty bait supplier two towns over, using a account registered to her sister's maiden name. She'd timed her exit from the exam room to a six-minute gap she'd learned, during a prior visit to that same orthopedic office months earlier for an unrelated appointment, was the average window between when a cast tech finished wrapping and when the physician returned to sign off.
None of it, on its own, would have been an ironclad case. Together, laid end to end by a detective with a corkboard and too much coffee, it painted the picture of someone who had planned to kill her stepson slowly enough to look like a tragedy, and who had very nearly succeeded, twice — once at the park, once in that exam room — before a babysitter two weeks into the job had refused to let a scream go unanswered.
Marissa's attorney tried, in the earliest hearing, to frame the wound as "a preexisting infection Mrs. Vale had no knowledge of," and the argument survived exactly as long as it took the prosecution to enter the bait supplier's shipping records into evidence.
Daniel sat through every hearing he was permitted to attend. He filed for sole custody the same week Marissa was charged, quietly, without press, without vindictiveness — just a father trying to make sure the paperwork finally matched the truth he'd been too slow to see. He also, on Denise Okafor's advice, began seeing a family therapist with Noah twice a week, because a boy who has spent a year believing that telling the truth would cost him his last living parent does not simply stop believing that the day the truth comes out. That takes longer. That takes work neither of them had known, until now, that they needed.
Evelyn stayed on as Noah's babysitter through all of it — not out of pity, though there was some of that, but because Noah had asked, in the specific, careful way children ask for things they're afraid will be denied, if she would keep coming even after he didn't need a hospital anymore.
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"You don't have to," he told her, the same week the cast finally came off for good, replaced by nothing but a thin white scar and a course of physical therapy. "I know it's not really your job to fix things like that."
"It wasn't my job," Evelyn agreed. "I did it anyway. That's usually how the important stuff gets done."
