The Vitamins
Chapter 04 - The Vitamins
The pills were pale yellow.
Lily remembered that much.
Sometimes Vanessa crushed them into applesauce.
Sometimes she mixed something bitter into warm milk.
When Lily complained that it made her sleepy, Vanessa told her sleep helped bones heal.
Dr. Hayes listened without interrupting.
A hospital social worker named Karen joined us.
So did a pediatric specialist.
I sat beside Lily on the bed while adults asked questions no eight-year-old should have needed to answer.
Did the medicine make her dizzy?
Yes.
Did she ever fall after taking it?
Sometimes.
Was she allowed to walk without the cast?
No.
Did Vanessa become angry if she tried?
Lily stared at her hands.
“Yes.”
I closed my eyes.
There had been signs.
Looking back, I could see all of them.
The canceled birthdays.
The missed video calls.
The photographs where Lily always looked tired.
Vanessa's constant explanations.
She's resting.
She's at therapy.
She's having a difficult day.
I had believed Lily was recovering.
In reality, she had been disappearing.
One small piece at a time.
By afternoon, the hospital toxicology team confirmed that Lily had been repeatedly exposed to a prescription sedative.
The drug had been prescribed to Vanessa six months earlier.
That was when police became involved.
Vanessa's attorney arrived before the detectives.
Charles Reed was sixty, silver-haired, expensive, and calm in the way only powerful men who believed rules were for other people could be calm.
He walked into the consultation room and immediately demanded Lily's discharge.
Dr. Hayes refused.
Charles smiled.
“You may want to reconsider.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It's professional advice.”
Then he turned to me.
“Margaret, you should go home.”
I laughed.
It surprised even me.
Charles had prepared himself for tears.
He hadn't prepared himself for laughter.
“You people spent a year telling everyone I was an unstable old woman,” I said. “You kept me from my granddaughter. You medicated her. You put her leg in a cast she didn't need.”
“You should be careful with accusations.”
“You should be careful with grandmothers.”
His smile vanished.
That afternoon, temporary emergency protection was granted to the hospital.
Vanessa could not remove Lily.
But that didn't mean I could take her home.
Charles had already filed an objection.
Against me.
At seven that evening, Karen brought me a copy.
The document described me as emotionally unstable.
It mentioned the antidepressants I had taken after my husband's death.
It mentioned the night, twelve years earlier, when I had been arrested for driving after two glasses of wine.
Charges had later been reduced.
I had never repeated the mistake.
But Charles had found it.
Every ugly thing I had ever survived was now printed on paper as proof that I was dangerous.
At the bottom was something worse.
A psychiatric evaluation.
My name was on it.
So was a doctor's signature.
It claimed I suffered from memory loss, paranoid thinking, and episodes of confusion.
I had never met that doctor.
I had never taken that examination.
Someone had fabricated an entire medical record about me.
And when I looked at the date...
I realized it had been created three days after my son died.
May you like
This was bigger than Lily's cast.
Someone had been planning to remove me from her life from the very beginning.
