He was stalling me.
Nineteen more days and he would not have had to anymore.
PART 5
They were arrested on the same morning in April, at two different addresses, about twenty minutes apart.
I was at my sister’s in Ohio with Mira, in a kitchen, watching her do a jigsaw.
I did not see one second of either arrest.
That was Bisset’s idea and not mine, and I argued with her about it on the phone for eleven minutes and then did what she said.
The petition was dismissed in May.
Abner Toft drove four hours to sit in that room. He did not need to be there — Nance told him so on the phone.
He came anyway. In a tie, with the trust folder on his knees.
And he sat in the row directly behind me for the whole thing and did not have to say one word.
My husband’s position, delivered through his attorney, held for about six weeks.
It was that he genuinely believed his daughter was unwell, that he had acted out of a father’s concern, and that his wife’s emotional state had made the situation impossible to manage.
That position did not survive the recording.
It did not survive nine pages from his own brother.
And it really did not survive what was on Vonda Keel’s phone, which she handed over herself on a Tuesday.
There are three matters running now, with four agencies between them, and one of those agencies I had never heard of before April.
There is a date in the autumn. There will probably be another one after that.
Odell Nance has asked me not to put one word about any of that in writing anywhere.
This time I am listening to her, which is new for me.
I filed in May. Full custody, no contact.
I got both of them.
And his own attorney did not argue the no-contact piece for one minute in that room — which tells you exactly how much of the file that man had already read.
Mira was seen by a real pediatrician on a Wednesday in April. A woman called Dr. Abara, in a proper clinic, with a waiting room full of other people’s children.
They ran everything. All of it, across two appointments eleven days apart, including the tox panel that would have ended this in November if anybody had ordered it.
