She told the dispatcher there were forty-one dates in the notebook. Then she started reading them aloud, one by one, because she had decided that if she was finally going to tell someone, she was going to make sure nobody could say she had misunderstood. The dates weren’t random. Each one matched something that had happened at home, and beside several of them she had written a single word she didn’t fully understand. The dispatcher asked her why she had been keeping records, and my daughter went quiet for several seconds before saying, “Because Mom keeps saying it didn’t happen.”
The police arrived before I knew anything was wrong. I was still at work when an officer called and asked me to come to the station, and the first thing he said was that my daughter was safe. The second thing he said was that they had taken photographs of our house that afternoon. I asked what she had told them, and he said they had found something in the hallway that matched one of the dates in her notebook. Then he asked me a question I couldn’t answer: “Ma’am, who told you those marks on the door were from the old repair?”
I drove home and opened the notebook myself. Forty-one dates. Forty-one little entries in my daughter’s handwriting. But on the last page, underneath the newest date, she’d written something she’d never said to me out loud: “I know what he does when you’re asleep.” I barely finished reading it before my phone rang. It was the detective, and he told me they had found something in the house that changed the entire direction of the investigation. Then he asked me to look inside the kitchen cabinet above the refrigerator and tell him whether anything was missing…
