Chapter 2 - The Digital Ghost
The following three days were a blur of shadows and hushed voices. The police officer assigned to my case, Detective Miller, was a man whose tired eyes told me he had seen this particular brand of domestic horror a thousand times. He waited until the swelling in my face had receded enough for me to talk, though speaking still felt like swallowing needles.
"Your father is currently out on bail," Miller said, his voice flat. "He claims you fell in the garage. He claims you were intoxicated, that you started the fight."
I gripped the bedrail, the metal cool against my trembling fingers. "I don't drink," I whispered, my voice a ragged rasp. "I don't fight. I was buying strawberries. I was going home to make a pie."
Miller sighed, pulling a USB drive from his pocket. "A neighbor, Rebecca, installed a security camera near the driveway after a string of package thefts. She didn't mean to record your house, but the angle… it caught the garage door. It caught the audio, too."
He plugged the drive into a portable laptop. I watched as the pixels swirled into life. The graininess of the image couldn't hide the brutality of the act. There I was, walking toward the garage, my grocery bag still in hand. There was my father, his face contorted into a mask of pure, unadulterated rage.
The audio was the worst part. My father's voice, booming and desperate: "I hit her because she wouldn't stop telling the truth."
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I saw my mother on the screen then, too. She had walked out of the house, looked at my broken body, and instead of calling 911, she had simply stepped over me to reach the car.
"She knew," I whispered, the realization hitting me harder than my father's fist. "She didn't just believe him. She watched him do it."
