Part 6
Maeve drove to Lakeview Regional with the note sealed in an evidence sleeve on the passenger seat.
She did not speed. She wanted to. Every red light felt like an accusation. But the last thing the case needed was an assistant district attorney explaining why she broke traffic laws because a three-year-old’s stuffed rabbit might hold the missing piece of a conspiracy.
Dr. Sloane met her outside Jenna Hart’s room with the careful expression of a man prepared to say no.
“She’s awake,” he said. “That doesn’t mean she can handle a courtroom conversation.”
“I’m not bringing her court,” Maeve replied. “I’m bringing her a question.”
Inside the room, Jenna looked smaller than Maeve remembered from photographs. Bruising had faded into yellow shadows along her cheek and jaw. Her left arm rested in a sling, and one side of her mouth moved less easily when she tried to speak. Still, her eyes sharpened when Maeve introduced herself.
“My daughter?” Jenna asked.
“She’s safe.”
Jenna closed her eyes for a moment, and the monitor beside her bed recorded the change in her breathing.
“She’s with Tasha Reynolds right now,” Maeve continued. “Scout is with her too.”
“The dog,” Jenna whispered. Her mouth tried to curve. “She always loved dogs.”
Maeve sat in the chair beside the bed. She had questioned victims in hospitals before. The rooms made every question feel cruel. Machines beeped, nurses entered with gloves and charts, pain lived in the white spaces between words. But the note in her folder made waiting impossible.
“Jenna, do you remember leaving a message behind the pantry shelf?”
Jenna stared at her. For a second, Maeve thought the injury had stolen the memory. Then Jenna’s good hand moved weakly against the blanket.
“Bunny,” she said.
Maeve leaned in. “Lily’s stuffed rabbit?”
Jenna nodded. Tears gathered but did not fall. “I couldn’t get out. I thought—if they found the folder, maybe not the copy.”
“Where is it?”
“Inside.” Jenna’s speech slowed, each word costing her. “Seam. Back.”
Maeve looked at Dr. Sloane. His face had gone still.
“Who hurt you?” Maeve asked, though the answer was no longer the only thing they needed.
Jenna’s eyes filled with fear so quickly Maeve almost withdrew the question.
“Graham,” Jenna whispered. “Evan sent him. He said he’d ruin Tyler first. Then me.”
The room seemed to tighten around the monitor’s steady beep.
Maeve did not ask for more than the doctor allowed. She confirmed the basics: Jenna had gathered payroll records, false invoices, and emails from Brooks & Vale Development; she had hidden a copy of the files on a small flash drive when Evan Brooks began threatening her; Graham Voss came to the apartment claiming he wanted to negotiate. When Jenna refused to hand over the drive, he attacked her and staged enough chaos to make Tyler look responsible.
Jenna remembered Lily crying once and then going silent.
“She heard me,” Jenna whispered.
“She heard you tell her to hide.”
Jenna turned her face toward the pillow. “I couldn’t get up.”
Maeve had no legal question for that. She only said, “She knows you tried.”
Tasha brought Lily to the hospital the next morning after doctors approved a short visit. Scout could not come into the room because of hospital policy, but he waited in a family consultation area downstairs with his handler, and Lily touched his head before going up as if taking courage with her.
At the doorway, Lily stopped.
Jenna lifted her good hand.
Neither of them moved for a long moment. The adults in the room seemed to understand without speaking that this reunion did not belong to them.
Then Lily walked to the bed. Not fast, not with the wild abandon of a child in a movie, but carefully, watching every tube, every bandage, every place that might hurt. A nurse helped her climb onto the safe edge of the mattress.
Jenna closed her hand around Lily’s fingers.
“Hi, bug,” she whispered.
Lily’s chin trembled. “You got broken.”
“A little.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Sometimes.”
Lily studied her mother’s face, then lifted the stuffed rabbit. “Bunny helped me. He can help you now.”
Jenna looked at Maeve over the child’s head.
Maeve understood. So did Tasha. The rabbit was evidence now, but not only evidence. It was the object Lily had clutched through the worst weeks of her life.
“We need to look inside Bunny,” Maeve said gently. “Your mom put something important there to keep it safe. We’ll be careful, and you can watch.”
Lily’s arms tightened around the toy. “He’ll get hurt?”
Tasha knelt beside the bed. “We can ask the nurse for tiny scissors. Like surgery.”
Lily considered this. “Bunny gets a Band-Aid?”
“As many as he wants,” Jenna whispered.
The nurse brought a sterile suture kit and, with gloved hands, opened a small seam along the rabbit’s back. Maeve watched Lily’s face more than the toy. The child did not cry, but she gripped her mother’s fingers hard.
Inside the worn stuffing, wrapped in plastic, was a small flash drive.
No one spoke for several seconds.
Then Lily leaned toward the rabbit and whispered, “You did good.”
Maeve took the drive in an evidence bag and signed the chain-of-custody form with a hand that nearly shook. The files would need authentication. Defense attorneys would fight them. Nothing in law became simple because the truth had finally become visible.
But the missing copy existed.
Jenna closed her eyes, exhausted. Lily placed the rabbit against her mother’s shoulder, seam open, stuffing slightly disturbed.
“Bunny needs his Band-Aid,” Lily said.
The nurse smiled softly. “I have just the thing.”
By the time Maeve left the hospital, the flash drive was on its way to digital forensics. She sat in her parked car for almost a minute before starting the engine. Across the lot, rain tapped against windshields and gathered in shallow silver pools.
Her phone buzzed.
It was Nolan.
“We opened the drive,” he said. “Maeve, it’s all there…”
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