For the next week, life became strangely ordinary.

Treatment continued.

Meals had to be made.

Laundry piled up.

Lily still wanted pancakes shaped like animals.

She still complained that Rachel’s scrambled eggs were “too eggy.”

She still laughed when I did terrible impressions of her doctors.

That normality saved me.

Rachel stayed with us most nights.

I reduced my work hours.

My company approved extended family leave without argument.

For the first time since Lily’s diagnosis, I stopped trying to maintain the illusion that I could work as if nothing had changed.

Everything had changed.

One Thursday afternoon, Lily and I were building a puzzle at the dining table.

She suddenly said, “Can we get rid of the chair?”

I looked at her.

“What chair?”

“The basement one.”

I had no idea what she meant.

We rarely used the basement except for storage.

“What basement chair?”

Lily’s hands stopped moving.

“The gray one.”

I waited.

Dr. Patel and Monica had taught me not to lead her.

Not to guess.

Not to put words in her mouth.

“Tell me about it.”

Lily looked toward the basement door.

“Vanessa made me sit there.”

“When?”

“When I was bad.”

My pulse quickened.

“What did bad mean?”

Lily shrugged.

“When I cried too much.”

I stared at her.

“What happened when you sat there?”

“She turned the light off.”

The puzzle piece slipped from my fingers.

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were you alone?”

She nodded.

“Was the door locked?”

“I think so.”

I wanted to ask a hundred questions.

I did not.

Instead, I called Monica.

Within hours, Denise was back at our house.

We went downstairs together.

The basement smelled like cardboard and laundry detergent.

Against the far wall sat a gray folding chair.

I had seen it a thousand times.

It had never meant anything to me.

Beside it was an old utility-room door.

Denise examined the lock.

It could be secured from the outside.

My stomach turned.

Lily stood at the top of the stairs with Rachel.

She would not come down.

Denise photographed everything.

Then she noticed scratches on the wall beside the chair.

Not random scratches.

Small lines.

Grouped together.

Four.

Four.

Four.

Three.

Fifteen marks.

I stared at them.

“What are those?”

Denise did not answer.

Lily did.

From the stairs.

“I counted.”

The room seemed to stop.

“Counted what?”

“How many times.”

Rachel sat down on the top step.

My knees nearly gave out.

Denise’s expression changed for the first time since I met her.

Not shock.

Anger.

Controlled anger.

She climbed the stairs toward Lily.

“What did you count, sweetheart?”

Lily pointed downstairs.

“How many times she put me there.”

I looked at the fifteen scratches.

Fifteen.

I remembered evenings when I came home and Lily was unusually quiet.

I remembered Vanessa saying treatment had exhausted her.

I remembered Lily falling asleep early.

I remembered once asking why her eyes were swollen.

Vanessa said she had been crying about losing her hair.

Maybe she had.

Maybe she had been crying in the dark.

Denise called someone from the stairwell.

Then she looked at me.

“This changes the investigation.”

“How?”

“We may be looking at a pattern of confinement.”

The word confinement sounded unreal inside my house.

This was the basement where I stored Christmas decorations.

Where Lily kept an old bicycle.

Where I had once built her a cardboard castle.

Now all I could see were fifteen scratches.

Denise asked whether we had cameras inside the home.

“Only exterior.”

“Any old baby monitors?”

I stopped.

Lily had used a camera monitor after surgery because doctors wanted us watching for nighttime complications.

We stopped using it six months ago.

But the device had stored clips in the cloud.

My hands began shaking.

I looked at Denise.

“I might have video.”