Chapter 2 - WHAT MICHAEL NEEDED GONE
Leo was admitted to Presbyterian Hospital just after nine that night.
His fever turned out to be viral, but the pediatrician documented dehydration and told me plainly that another day without reliable fluids could have become dangerous.
Hearing that made the entire situation different.
I had spent the first hours thinking Michael had frightened me.
Now there was medical documentation showing what his decision had done to our son.
Carol sat beside me in the emergency department waiting area without taking off her coat.
“Tell me everything,” I said.
She stared at the vending machines.
“Michael called me Wednesday night.”
The night before he locked us inside.
He had asked Carol not to visit us until Sunday.
He told her I had become “volatile” because I suspected him of cheating and that we needed seventy-two hours apart.
“And you believed him?”
“I believed you two were having marriage problems.”
“He locked a three-year-old in a house without food.”
She looked down.
“I didn’t know that part.”
What Carol did know was that Michael had been desperate about money.
Over eighteen months, she had given him nearly sixty thousand dollars from the savings her late husband left her.
Michael called it temporary business cash-flow trouble.
Carol called it helping her son.
Three weeks earlier, he asked for another forty thousand.
She refused.
After that, he became strangely interested in whether she still had the original paperwork from when Michael and I bought our house.
I stopped her.
“Why would he care?”
Carol finally looked at me.
“I don’t know.”
A police officer arrived before midnight to take my statement.
He told me they had photographed the exterior padlock, the empty kitchen, the disabled internet equipment, and the office.
Then he asked whether Michael normally kept financial records at home.
“Why?”
“Because there were loan documents on the computer.”
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My name was on them.
I had never seen them before.
