Whatever Derek started… wasn’t finished.

That thought settled over me like a second skin.

I could feel it in the hairs prickling on the back of my neck, in the way Mia’s small hand refused to let go of mine even when she pretended to be focused on the cartoon playing on the hospital TV.

Derek might have lost control of the physical situation now that we were in a hospital with locks and staff and security cameras. But he hadn’t lost the script. He was still trying to direct it.

And one of his favorite props, I realized, was fear.

The realization didn’t make me less afraid.

It just made me angry enough to move through the fear instead of freezing in it.

By morning, the hospital room had a different feel.

The overhead lights were too bright; the coffee in the visitors’ lounge tasted like someone had filtered it through cardboard. The adrenaline that had carried me through the night gave way to a thick, heavy exhaustion.

Mia slept curled against my side on the narrow bench by the window. Chloe had gone to school under Tasha’s watch with strict instructions not to talk to anyone about anything until I said it was okay.

Technically, that’s not how secrets work with kids. But saying it made me feel like I had some control over something.

Lauren had spent most of the night in a conference room with Holt and Ortega. I’d caught glimpses of her—a smudge of mascara, a hunched set of shoulders through a glass pane. Once, she’d caught my eye, pressed a desperate hand to the window, then flinched when Holt gently redirected her.

Now, she stood at the foot of our room’s bed, eyes red, hair in a lopsided ponytail, hands twisted in front of her.

“Can I come in?” she asked.

It wasn’t the demand from the hallway earlier.

It was a question, small and uncertain.

I looked at Mia.

She was awake, watching her mother with that wide, guarded gaze kids develop when their safe people stop being solid.

“Mia,” I murmured, “do you want to talk to your mom?”

She pressed her face into my side, then peeked out.

“Is he here?” she whispered.

“No,” I said. “He’s not.”

Lauren’s face crumpled.

“I would never bring him here,” she said quickly. “I swear. I… I didn’t know. I didn’t want—”

“Lauren,” I said quietly, “you’re not going to fix this with promises.”

She flinched at the bluntness.

For most of our lives, I’d run interference for her, smoothing over the messes she made when she followed her heart off cliffs. I’d been the one to call Dad when she eloped at twenty-one, the one to pick her up at 2 a.m. when fights with ex-boyfriends turned into slammed doors and broken plates.

This time, I couldn’t be her clean-up crew.

I could be Mia’s anchor.

The two things were not the same.

Holt stepped in behind her, clipboard in hand.

“You can sit for ten minutes,” she told Lauren. “Then I need you back in conference room three. Detective Ortega has more questions.”

Lauren sank carefully onto the edge of the bed opposite Mia.

“Hi, baby,” she whispered.

Mia didn’t answer.

She stared at her mother like she was trying to match the woman in front of her with the one who’d told her to be quiet, to be “good,” to lie about being hurt.

“I thought you said doctors don’t hurt kids,” Mia whispered finally.

The question was simple.

It carried the weight of the world.

Lauren’s chin trembled. “I was wrong,” she said. “And I’m so, so sorry.”

“Why didn’t you come in with me?” Mia asked. “Why did you stay outside?”

Because answering that honestly would mean admitting she’d been afraid—of Derek, of the father’s family, of losing Mia.

“Because I made a deal with someone I shouldn’t have trusted,” Lauren said, voice breaking. “And I thought I was protecting you by not asking too many questions. I thought… if he said it was okay, it was okay. I was wrong.”

Mia watched her for a long moment.

She was six, but some part of her seemed older, like the experience had yanked her forward faster than anyone wanted.

“Are you in trouble?” she asked.

“Yes,” Lauren whispered. “I think I am.”

Mia’s gaze drifted to me.

“Aunt Em?” she murmured. “If Mom goes to jail… can I live with you?”

The question sliced through me.

I swallowed.

“You live with both of us,” I said carefully. “You have a mom who loves you. And you have me. And Grandpa in heaven telling us all what to do horribly from a cloud somewhere. However this plays out, you won’t be alone. I promise.”

Her shoulders loosened just a fraction.

Holt cleared her throat gently.

“Lauren,” she said. “Ten minutes are up.”

Lauren nodded, pushed to her feet, then hesitated.

“Emily?” she said.

“What?”

She swallowed.

“Thank you,” she said. “For taking her straight here. For… going against me. I hate you for it and I’m grateful. Both.”

“Maybe work on the second one,” I said. “The first isn’t going to help anyone.”

She gave a watery laugh and followed Holt out.

The door closed behind them.

Mia stared at it.

Then she curled closer to me.

“Will I get a scar?” she asked after a minute, small fingers reaching to touch the edge of the taped cut.

“Maybe a little one,” I said. “But scars don’t mean you’re broken. They mean you healed from something. They’re proof you survived.”

She nodded thoughtfully.

“Do you have scars?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Some you can see. Some you can’t.”

She yawned.

“Chloe says scars make you look cool,” she murmured.

I smiled. “Chloe’s a genius,” I said.

Over the next week, the pieces of the story came together like a puzzle dumped out of the box upside down—slowly, frustratingly, with more questions than answers at first.

Derek had never been a fully licensed physician.

He had dropped out of medical school in his third year after a series of “academic integrity concerns,” according to the terse statement from the institution that Ortega’s team dug up.

He’d gotten just close enough to medicine to fake it convincingly.

Brightwell Pediatric Research was a defunct LLC tied to a PO box and a rented office suite in a strip mall four towns over. No official medical licensing. No regulatory oversight.

He’d marketed himself quietly to vulnerable people—women like Lauren whose exes had threatened custody battles, families suspicious about children’s paternity, parents desperate for “answers” without the hassle or cost of court-ordered DNA tests.

He’d pretended to offer those tests.

Most of them were cheek swabs and blood draws done cheaply and sloppily, then sent to actual labs under false pretenses.

But occasionally, according to files found stuffed into a storage unit he’d abandoned, he’d insisted on “more accurate sampling” for “complex cases.”

Those cases involved small incisions.

Kids.

Always kids.

The tissue he removed?

He labeled it, sold some as “research samples” to less-than-ethical organizations overseas, kept others for leverage—blackmail material against fathers or mothers by threatening to reveal dirt if they didn’t pay.

It was like watching a horror movie written by someone who loved spreadsheets.

He was smart.

He was organised.

He was cruel.

Lauren’s case fell into what Ortega began calling the “custody panic” category.

Her ex’s family had hinted for years that they doubted Mia was “really one of them.”

Their cruelty had chipped away at Lauren’s confidence until she was raw enough for someone like Derek to find.

He had stepped into that rawness with all the right words.

“You’re a good mom.”

“You’re just trying to protect her.”

“I know a doctor.”

“If we do this my way, you can shut them up forever.”

He’d made vague threats about “what lawyers can do,” painted the ex’s family as monsters who would rip Mia away if Lauren didn’t take his “help.”

When Lauren told Holt and Ortega all this, halting and ashamed, she added something that made my skin crawl.

“He told me,” she whispered, “that he felt called to help children.”

“From what?” Ortega asked.

“From the system,” she said. “He said doctors and courts drag their feet. He said he ‘expedited’ things.”

“He expedited himself straight into a felony,” Ortega replied dryly.

They were still trying to find him.

The clinic was empty.

His apartment was cleared out except for some cheap furniture and a stack of clothes.

Neighbors said a moving truck had come at dawn the morning we took Mia to the hospital.

“Out of nowhere,” a woman with a toddler on her hip told Ortega. “He always seemed nice. Brought cookies at Christmas. Quiet. Paid rent on time. I never would’ve guessed.”

They never do.

If they did, people like him wouldn’t get this far.

In the meantime, life went into a strange, suspended animation.

Mia was discharged after two days under observation.

She came home—to my home, not Lauren’s—under a temporary emergency custody order signed by a judge.

Lauren stayed in her house, under supervision.

She was allowed daily video calls, but no unsupervised contact.

Mia didn’t understand the legal nuances, and we didn’t explain them all.

We just told her the true part:

“This is to keep you safe.”

Chloe understood more.

One night, as I tucked her into bed, she whispered, “Is Mia going to live with us forever now?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Maybe for a while. Maybe longer. Grown-ups are figuring it out.”

Chloe frowned at the ceiling.

“Are you in trouble?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “We’re helping. But helping sometimes means other people get in trouble.”

She nodded.

“Good,” she said with the unfiltered justice of a seven-year-old. “Derek is bad.”

“He’s done bad things,” I corrected. “People can choose to do bad things. That doesn’t mean they were born that way. But he chose, and now other people get to choose how to respond.”

She considered this for a second.

“Can I punch him?” she asked.

“No,” I said, stifling a laugh. “That’s not how justice works.”

She sighed. “Then I’ll just draw him with poop on his head.”

“That is absolutely your right,” I said solemnly.

The next day, she presented me with a drawing that looked like Derek in stick-figure form with a large brown blob on his hair.

Underneath, in shaky letters, she’d written:

BAD MAN.

Two weeks later, Ortega called me while I was in the grocery store staring blankly at a shelf of cereals.

“We got him,” he said.

For a second, I didn’t understand.

“Derek?” I asked.

“Arrested crossing state lines,” he replied. “He used a credit card at a gas station in Nevada. Local PD picked him up off our warrant.”

I leaned against the cart handle, knees suddenly weak with relief.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“He’ll be extradited back here,” Ortega said. “He’ll have a lawyer. There’ll be hearings. Maybe a trial. Maybe a plea. It’ll be long. But he’s not lurking outside your hospital room anymore.”

I closed my eyes.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“You did the hard part,” he said. “You brought her in. You didn’t turn around. A lot of people would have.”

I thought of his text: If you take her in, you’ll ruin everything.

“Everything needed ruining,” I said.

Lauren’s journey was not as neat as Derek’s arrest.

Her choices had not been as clear-cut as his crimes, and the system reflected that.

She was investigated for negligence for allowing an unlicensed procedure on her daughter.

She was also a victim of manipulation and threats.

The state recommended mandatory parenting classes, therapy, and monitored visits rather than immediate removal of her rights.

Holt explained it to me in the bland language of forms and recommendations.

“What it means,” she said when I looked confused, “is that the state is saying: You did something wrong. You’re not being cut off from your child forever. If you do the work. If you show us you can choose differently next time.”

Lauren balked.

Then she went.

She showed up to every required session, eyes swollen, notebook in hand.

She cried a lot.

She yelled sometimes—in private, not at the facilitators.

She said things like, “Why didn’t anyone teach me this when I was twenty?” and “It never occurred to me that love could be dangerous if I mixed it with fear.”

She scrawled words in the margins of her worksheets.

Choice. Fear. Safety. Boundaries.

Mia started seeing a child therapist.

They played with dolls. They colored. They did something called “narrative work,” which Holt explained as “helping her put what happened into a story where she’s not at fault.”

Sometimes Mia came home quiet.

Sometimes she came home with big questions.

“Does loving someone mean you have to do everything they say?” she asked once at dinner, pushing peas around her plate.

“No,” I said. “Loving someone doesn’t mean you turn off your brain. Or ignore when something feels wrong.”

She nodded slowly.

“If someone says it’s ‘for my own good,’” she pressed, “and it hurts… is it still good?”

I thought of all the times adults had used that phrase to justify harm.

“Sometimes people are wrong about what’s good,” I said. “Your body is yours. If something feels wrong or scary and you didn’t choose it, you’re allowed to speak up. Even if the person is a grown-up. Even if they say it’s love. Especially then.”

She absorbed that, little brow furrowed.

Chloe chimed in.

“If anyone tries to hurt you,” she said, “we’ll sit on them.”

“Chloe,” I said automatically.

“What? It’s a good plan,” she argued.

Mia giggled.

Some tension eased.

Months later, we walked into the courthouse together for Derek’s arraignment.

My palms were slick.

The building smelled like old wood and too many cases.

We didn’t bring the kids. They stayed home with Tasha, who had insisted we not give them front-row seats to the justice system.

Lauren walked between me and Holt.

She’d ditched her usual tight dresses and heels for a simple sweater and slacks. It made her look simultaneously younger and older.

“Do I have to look at him?” she asked.

“No,” Holt said. “You can if you want. You don’t have to.”

We sat on a hard bench near the back.

Derek was brought in wearing a suit with no tie. He looked smaller somehow, without the polished backdrop of the clinic. His hair was slightly longer, his eyes darting.

When he saw us, his lips curled into something like a smirk.

The charges were read.

Fraud.

Unlicensed medical practice.

Child endangerment.

Blackmail.

The list went on longer than I thought it would.

For each one, he said, “Not guilty.”

Lauren flinched.

I felt something settle in my chest.

He was still playing his story.

We were telling ours.

The judge set bail so high even Derek’s past “clients” couldn’t buy him out.

As we walked out, Lauren turned to me.

“I did this,” she said.

“You did some of it,” I corrected. “He did the rest.”

“I trusted him,” she groaned. “Over you. Over my own… discomfort. I knew something felt off. But he said… he said everyone else was overreacting. That people see monsters where there’s just paperwork.”

“That’s how he works,” I said. “He takes that discomfort and uses it as cover. You’re not the first. You probably won’t be the last unless the court does its job.”

She nodded.

“I want to testify,” she said suddenly.

I blinked.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “The defense will shred you if they can. They’ll drag every mistake into the light.”

She swallowed.

“I know,” she said. “But if some other woman hears me and thinks, ‘Oh, that sounds like my situation,’ and leaves sooner… it’s worth it. I don’t want to waste this mess.”

Holt smiled faintly.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you talk about this like you’re building something instead of just being crushed by it,” she said.

Lauren looked at me.

“You gave me that,” she said. “When you drove straight to the hospital instead of doing what I asked. You ruined everything,” she added, with a half-sad, half-grateful twist of her lips. “Thank God.”

I laughed.

It felt strange in the courthouse hallway.

It also felt necessary.

The legal process stretched over a year.

Derek’s lawyers tried to spin him as a “misunderstood practitioner” trying to “help underserved communities.”

The prosecution built a quiet, careful case.

Former clients testified.

Parents.

Children whose voices shook when they described “the office with the stickers” and “the shots that weren’t supposed to hurt.”

Lauren told her story on the stand.

She didn’t try to make herself look better.

She didn’t blame me.

She said, voice shaking but clear, “I was so scared of losing my daughter that I let someone hurt her in the name of keeping her. That is not his fault alone. That’s mine too. I’m trying to do better.”

In the end, Derek was convicted.

He got years.

The number didn’t matter as much as the bars.

He couldn’t reach us from there.

He couldn’t send photos from hospital hallways or take pictures of envelopes on kitchens tables or call himself “Doctor” to another desperate mother until time and oversight, hopefully, had reshaped him into something less dangerous—or at least kept him contained.

Life didn’t snap back to normal.

There was no “normal” to return to.

There was, instead, a new pattern.

Mia became a fixture in our house.

Her room at my place had a twin bed, glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, and a wall covered in drawings—rainbows, animals, a suspiciously muscular stick figure labeled “Super Aunt.”

She split her time between my home and Lauren’s, with check-ins from Holt’s team dwindling as Lauren proved, again and again, that she could make safer choices.

Chloe treated her like a sister.

Sometimes like a co-conspirator.

Once, I found them in the backyard, covered head-to-toe in mud, declaring themselves “Warrior Queens of Dirt.”

“Scars,” Mia said, holding up a scraped knee. “Proof of survival.”

I smiled, thinking she’d been listening more than I realized.

“You’re both going straight into the bath,” I said.

They yelped and ran.

Grandma’s sometimes-visit status turned into an open-door policy.

She came over once and never quite left.

She and the girls took over the kitchen on Sundays, baking lopsided cookies and pushing me out while I “rested”—which usually meant reading a book in the armchair and pretending I didn’t smell scorched sugar.

The house, once a place where Carla’s perfume lingered like a warning, smelled like cinnamon now.

Every so often, I’d catch my reflection in the hallway mirror and barely recognize myself.

Not because my face had changed that much.

Because I stood differently.

Less like someone waiting for the next blow.

More like someone who trusted herself to move toward the light, even when the road there ran through a hospital with fluorescent bulbs and terrifying questions.

Lauren and I still argued sometimes.

Old patterns don’t evaporate completely.

But when we did, we owned our parts.

She didn’t ask me to ignore my instincts.

I didn’t ask her to be someone she wasn’t.

We found a rhythm.

The day the final paperwork arrived—closing out the state’s involvement, granting full parental rights back to her with notes of “completed requirements” and “no further concerns”—we sat on my porch steps, the girls playing on the sidewalk.

“Do you ever wish I’d listened to you?” I asked.

She snorted.

“In what world did I ever listen to my big sister on the first try?” she asked. Then she sobered.

“I wish I’d listened to myself,” she said. “I wish I’d let the unease mean something instead of… explaining it away.”

She nudged my shoulder.

“But you listening to yourself when you did?” she added. “That saved her. And me.”

I looked at Mia.

She was chalking a hopscotch grid on the driveway, tongue sticking out in concentration.

“Stories like this always used to happen to somebody else,” I said. “On the news. In articles. Not in my family.”

“Stories like this happen in normal kitchens,” Lauren said quietly. “At normal pools. To people who are trying their best with bad information. That’s what scares me.”

“That’s what makes talking matter,” I replied.

She nodded.

We sat in comfortable silence for a minute.

Then Chloe yelled, “Moooom! Aunt Lauren! Come jump with us!”

“We’re busy being profound,” Lauren called back.

“You can be profound after hopping,” Chloe retorted.

I laughed.

We got up.

We hopped.

Sometimes, late at night, I still hear Derek’s text echo in my head:

You’ll ruin everything.

He was right.

For Lauren.

For Mia.

For him.

For me.

Everything did get ruined.

The old pattern.

The misdirected loyalties.

The dangerous belief that “keeping the peace” is more important than asking hard questions.

Sometimes ruin is the only way something better has room to grow.

Now, when I walk past my bathroom mirror before bed, I see a woman who confronted her sister, defied an unknown man, and watched police cars flash in her driveway without crumpling.

When Mia lifts her arm to change her shirt and I see the faint white line of the incision on her shoulder blade, I don’t just see what was done to her.

I see what was done for her afterward.

Questions asked.

Rooms entered.

Texts ignored.

Children believed.

I see a scar.

Proof she healed.

Proof she wasn’t left alone with the hurt.

And every time she repeats what she told her therapist one day—standing in our kitchen with a plastic doctor kit around her neck:

“If a grown-up says something is ‘for my own good’ and it doesn’t feel good… I can tell Aunt Em, and she’ll drive fast”—

I smile and say, “You’re right.”

Because whatever Derek started is finished now.

Not because he stopped.

Because we did.

 

The end