Wade
The detective assigned to Ivy's case, a quiet, methodical woman named Detective Cho, drove out to the old foster house herself the week after the protective order was filed. Wade still lived there, alone now, the placement license long since revoked but the house never sold.
He denied everything, of course. Cho told me only what she was allowed to — that his story kept shifting in small, telling ways each time she asked the same question from a different angle, that he claimed not to remember which of his brothers had visited and when, despite Derek's own phone records placing him at that address eleven times over four months.
Eleven times. Derek hadn't mentioned a number when he told me he'd "only visited." He hadn't mentioned it at all.
When Cho confronted him with the records, his story changed too — from "I barely went there" to "I went to check on the kids because I was worried about Wade," a version that might even have been partly true, and that made the whole situation more complicated instead of less. A man who suspected something and kept visiting anyway, without ever reporting it, wasn't the same as a man with nothing to hide. But it wasn't nothing either.
"I need you to understand something," Cho told me, sitting in my kitchen with a cup of coffee she never touched. "Cases like this rarely resolve as cleanly as people want them to. We may never get a clear answer on exactly what Derek did or didn't do while he was there. What we can prove is a pattern, a location, and a child's consistent, credible reaction to a specific sound and a specific man. Sometimes that has to be enough to keep her safe, even when it isn't enough to fully explain the past."
I asked her what that meant for us, practically. She was honest with me.
"It means the protective order will likely become permanent. It means Wade is looking at charges regardless of what happens with Derek. And it means you're going to have to decide, eventually, how much uncertainty you can live with regarding your husband — because the full truth may never arrive in a form clean enough for a courtroom."