Instead, I stayed with Emma and kept her wrapped in that blanket while Janine rubbed slow circles over her back. At some point Emma whispered, “Is he mad?”
Janine answered before I could. “He doesn’t get to decide anything tonight.”
The officers asked if there was anywhere else the videos could have been sent. A laptop. A tablet. Cloud storage. I said I didn’t know, and the shame of that nearly crushed me. I had shared a house with him. A bed. Passwords. Grocery lists. Years.
I hadn’t known.
Or maybe I had known something was wrong and kept sanding it down until it felt harmless.
That thought sat in my throat all night.
An investigator from the special victims unit met us at the hospital just before midnight. They wanted Emma checked, documented, and then referred to a child advocacy center in the morning. I hated every word in that sentence. Hated that my little girl’s life now included terms like documented and forensic and protected party.
But I hated the alternative more.
At the hospital, Emma wouldn’t let go of the new yellow washcloth Janine bought from the gift shop. She refused the pink one from our bathroom bag. She pushed it away and said, “That’s from the old house.”
The old house.
We were still legally inside my house. My name was on the deed. My dishes were in the cabinets. But in Emma’s mind, it was already a place we had left behind.
A social worker sat with me in a small room that smelled like coffee and printer toner. She told me what would happen next. Emergency protective order. Interview team. Digital evidence warrant. Safety plan. She spoke gently, but nothing about it felt gentle.
I signed every paper they put in front of me.
Around two in the morning, one of the officers returned with an update. They had found more files on Travis’s phone. The dates went back months. Some were short. Some were labeled with fake names. One folder had been hidden.
My ears rang so hard I barely heard the rest.
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