The detective asked about the baby monitor.

I stared at him.

“What about it?”

“There’s a camera above the crib.”

“Yes.”

“Was it recording?”

“No.”

Why was I so certain?

Because the power cord was hanging loose.

I had noticed it when I grabbed Leo.

The plug sat on the floor beside the wall outlet.

Valerie had unplugged it.

The detective wrote something down.

“Who normally uses the monitor?”

“Dad. Me sometimes. Valerie.”

“Does it have internal storage?”

“I don’t know.”

That question became important.

Our father, Daniel Miller, was forty-one.

He was working a late shift at the hospital where he managed facilities when the attack happened.

My mother had died when I was nine.

Dad married Valerie four years later.

Leo was Dad and Valerie’s biological child.

Which meant the woman who had pressed a pillow onto Leo’s face was not some unrelated stepmother attacking another woman’s baby.

She was his mother.

That fact made the whole thing even harder to understand.

Dad arrived at the hospital less than an hour later.

He looked at me.

Then Leo.

Then the bruising on my shoulder.

“What happened?”

I told him.

He sat down.

Did not speak for a long time.

Then:

“Valerie?”

“Yes.”

His face collapsed.

Not disbelief exactly.

Something closer to recognition he did not want.

The detective asked Dad about the monitor.

Dad said:

“It has a backup battery.”

I looked up.

“What?”

“For power outages. Maybe twenty or thirty minutes.”

“Does it record?”

“To microSD if the card’s installed.”

“Is it?”

Dad stared.

“Yes.”

The nursery became a crime scene again.

Police returned.

The camera remained mounted.

The cord was unplugged.

But the small indicator light had been disabled in the settings months earlier because it bothered Leo at night.

Valerie had unplugged the monitor.

She believed that killed it.

She did not know—or had forgotten—that Dad installed the internal backup battery.

The card was still inside.

The camera had recorded.