They didn’t go silent when I came home because Marisol had turned them against me.
They went silent because they were living in fear, and they’d learned to be small and quiet and invisible to survive Chloe, and they couldn’t tell the difference anymore between safe adults and dangerous ones except for Marisol, who they’d correctly identified as the one person in that house protecting them.
Chloe had told me the girls’ attachment to Marisol was suspicious. It was the opposite. It was the healthiest instinct my traumatized daughters had left. They were running toward the one safe harbor in a house I’d unknowingly made dangerous by bringing Chloe into it.
And the missing items — the earrings, the cash, the perfume Chloe had used to frame Marisol as a thief?
I had Hector pull the footage from the previous weeks. It didn’t take long. There was Chloe, on camera, taking her own earrings and cash and hiding them, building the story she’d fed me over candlelight, manufacturing a thief so she could get rid of the one person in the house who stood between her and my children.
