Chapter 10 - THE THREAT AT MY DOORFear is different when it knows your address.
I had dealt with angry parents, violent patients, grieving families, and men who punched walls because they could not punch fate. But a photo of my own front porch sent a thin, cold line straight through me.
Detective Hayes took my phone before I could pretend I was fine.
“Do not respond,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking about it.”
I said nothing.
She studied the photo. “This was taken recently.”
“How recently?”
“The morning newspaper is on your step.”
My mouth went dry.
Sarah, who had followed us into the hall, grabbed my arm. “Mara.”
“I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not,” she said. “And you don’t have to be.”
Hayes requested patrol at my house. She also asked if I had family there.
“No,” I said. “I live alone.”
For once, that felt less lonely than lucky.
The hospital placed me under internal security escort, which would have been absurd on any other day. But that day, absurdity had become procedure.
By late morning, news vans appeared outside.
Someone had leaked that police were investigating new evidence in the Anna Carter disappearance. Reporters gathered at the hospital entrance, asking whether Lily had been abused, whether Greg had been arrested, whether Anna’s remains had been found.
No one answered.
Greg’s lawyer held a statement on the courthouse steps by noon, calling the investigation “a grotesque violation of a grieving father’s rights.”
Rachel watched it on her phone from Lily’s room.
Her hands shook so hard she nearly dropped it.
“He’s doing it again,” she whispered. “He always makes himself the victim first.”
Lily looked up from a coloring book. “Is Daddy on TV?”
Rachel quickly turned off the phone. “Not anymore.”
But Lily had already seen enough.
“He cries different on TV,” she said.
I sat beside her. “Different how?”
She kept coloring, pressing the crayon too hard. “At home, he practices.”
Rachel went still.
Lily added a blue streak across the paper.
“He stands in the bathroom mirror and says Mommy’s name until tears come.”
No machine alarm sounded.
No one moved.
May you like
But in that quiet room, Greg Carter became something even worse than guilty.
He became rehearsed.
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