Consent

Greta's lawyer filed to have the camera footage excluded before the case ever reached a courtroom, arguing that our state's two-party consent law meant recording an employee's conversations and conduct in a private residence without her knowledge was itself unlawful, regardless of what the footage showed.

"It's a real argument," our own lawyer admitted, not unkindly, over the phone. "It's a nanny cam in your own home watching your own child, which usually holds up fine. But there's a phone call captured on that footage, and the audio of a private conversation is where these things sometimes get tricky depending on the judge."

"So the fracture scans don't matter?" I asked, my voice climbing higher than I meant it to.

"The medical evidence stands on its own, that's not going anywhere. But if the footage gets thrown out, we lose the clearest window into a pattern, and it becomes her word about a fall or an accident against Jonah's X-rays and nothing else connecting it directly to her."

For the first time since the crib, since the wrist, since Detective Boyle's careful list of names on a legal pad, I understood that having the truth on video didn't automatically mean anyone else had to believe it, or even be allowed to see it.

Chris and I sat with that for three days that felt like three months, waiting on a judge's ruling neither of us could do anything to speed up, watching Jonah's wrist heal in a small cast he kept trying to chew on, wondering what it would mean for a woman who'd hurt our son at least three separate times to walk away from all of it on a technicality about who gets to record what in whose own house.

That's the state things were in on the Thursday Caden called the detective's card number himself, without his mother knowing, and asked if he could talk again — this time somewhere she wouldn't find out about until it was already done.