The Perfect Child(72)

“What happened?” He knelt beside me and ran his hands through his hair.

My finger shook as I pointed to the other room. “Her.”

“What did she do?” His face blanched; he braced himself for what was to come.

“Nothing. She’s already done enough. I can’t be around her anymore. I can’t do it.”

He lowered his voice so Janie couldn’t hear in the room next door. “Be quiet. She might hear you.”

“I don’t care if she hears me.”

“I do.”

“Of course you do,” I said under my breath.

“What did you say?” he asked, then quickly shook his head. “Never mind.” He reached out to take Cole from me. “Why don’t you give him to me and go lie down for a while?”

I turned away, pulling Cole tighter against my chest. I only put him down to change him. Besides that, I wore him on me at all times.

“I don’t want her here.” I spit the words out.

“She’s our daughter. Where else is she supposed to go?”

“She’s not really our daughter.”

He recoiled like I’d slapped him. “Don’t you ever say that again.” His eyes flashed with anger. “We knew what we were getting into when we adopted her. We knew she would have problems. We signed up for this.”

“Problems? You call these problems? She’s a killer!” I shrieked.

He threw his hands up in disgust. “She hurt an animal because she was mad at you. There’s a big difference.”

“She’s a killer!”

He grabbed my arms, his fingernails digging into my skin. “Stop saying that.”

I jerked away. “Get your hands off me! Don’t touch me!”

He let go but stepped closer. His face was in mine, wearing an expression I’d never seen before. “She is our daughter, and she’s only seven years old.”

I folded my arms across my chest and looked at him without flinching. “I don’t want her here.”

“What are you talking about? We can’t just give her back—we’re her parents. Her parents, Hannah. Whether you like it or not, that’s what we signed on for.” His body shook as he tried to control his anger. “You can’t just give your kids away when it’s rough.”

“You can if your kid is a monster.”





CASE #5243

INTERVIEW:

PIPER GOLDSTEIN

Ron cracked his knuckles like he’d been doing all afternoon. I cringed. I didn’t know what was worse, their relentless questioning or the silence that made me so uncomfortable I wanted to start talking just to fill it. “What I’m having a hard time understanding is why Christopher went back to work if things were so bad and he was supposed to be such a good husband. What kind of a husband leaves his family at a time like that?”

“What else was he supposed to do?” It was the first time I’d challenged him, but I drew a line with the direction he was going. I didn’t like what he was implying.

Luke jumped in, always on Ron’s side. “He could’ve stayed home, got her a nanny, called one of their parents. There were a lot of options.”

I glared at them. “You can judge them all you want, but you weren’t in their situation.”

“Neither were you.” Luke didn’t try to hide his smirk.

Anger rose in my chest. They were never going to let that go. “He had to go back to work. They couldn’t afford for him not to.”

Luke snorted. “Really? You’re trying to tell me that an orthopedic surgeon needed money?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. The Bauers had sunk all their savings into buying their house and spent the last five years paying off all their student loan debts.” I wanted to point out that he’d know all of that if he knew the Bauers like I did, but I held myself back. “Do you have any idea how much it cost to pay for all Janie’s therapy? Medical insurance didn’t pay for her psychological care, and her medical costs were thousands of dollars each month. So Christopher couldn’t lose his job. Imagine how much stress that would’ve added to the situation. He was just trying to keep their family afloat.”

Ron finally jumped back in. “It dawns on me that there’s no record of the incident with the cat anywhere.”

“It wasn’t intentional.”

“Was there anything else you may have unintentionally left out?”





FORTY-FIVE

CHRISTOPHER BAUER

Hannah refused to come with me to the session I’d scheduled with Dr. Chandler. She said she was done going to therapy because Janie was never going to change, and she was sick of talking about it. She’d come around eventually. She just needed a few more days.

We had thought we’d be able to meet with Dr. Chandler twice a week after Hannah gave birth, but we hadn’t been to her office since Cole was born, and he was going to be two months old next Monday. Just because we hadn’t been there didn’t mean I hadn’t thought about what we’d talked about last time. I’d done plenty of research on reactive attachment disorder since then. I kept getting drawn into morbid documentaries about kids adopted from Russian orphanages who turned into mini–serial killers.