CHAPTER 6
The preliminary hearing was two weeks later.
It was a formality, really—a chance for the judge to decide if there was enough evidence to proceed to trial. But it was also our first glimpse of Voss in action, our first chance to see how he planned to defend Dad.
The courtroom was small, cold, impersonal.
Dad was brought in wearing an orange jumpsuit, his hands cuffed in front of him. He looked thinner than I remembered, his face gaunt, his hair uncombed. But when he saw us—Mom, Lila, me—his expression did not change. No guilt. No remorse. Just that same cold, irritated look he always wore when something was inconvenient.
He sat down beside Voss and whispered something.
Voss nodded, his face a mask of professional detachment.
The hearing began.
The prosecution called its witnesses first—the paramedic who had treated Lila, the officer who had cut the padlock, the detective who had investigated the case, the smart-meter technician who explained how the heater had been disabled remotely. One by one, they laid out the evidence, building a wall of fact that seemed impossible to climb.
Then Voss cross-examined each of them.
And he was good.
Terrifyingly good.
He did not argue that Dad was innocent. Not exactly. Instead, he planted tiny seeds of doubt. He asked the paramedic if Lila’s injuries could have been caused by a fall, not by assault. He asked the officer if the padlock could have been put on by someone else. He asked the detective if it was possible that someone else had used Dad’s tablet, that the device number could have been spoofed, that the digital trail could have been faked.
None of it stuck.
But it did not need to.
Voss was not trying to win the preliminary hearing. He was testing the waters. He was seeing which arguments landed, which witnesses cracked under pressure, which pieces of evidence were most vulnerable. He was laying the groundwork for the trial.
Then he called his first witness.
Dad’s brother.
Uncle Ray.
I had not seen him since Christmas. He walked into the courtroom looking nervous, his eyes darting around, avoiding ours. He sat down in the witness box and was sworn in.
Voss stood up.
“Mr. Carter,” he said. “Can you tell the court about your brother’s state of mind in the weeks leading up to Christmas Eve?”
Uncle Ray swallowed hard.
“He was stressed,” he said. “Real stressed. Lila’s medical bills were piling up. He was working extra shifts, taking on side jobs, just trying to keep up. He never complained, not really, but you could see it wearing on him. He wasn’t sleeping. He wasn’t eating right. He was… he was at the end of his rope.”
Voss nodded sympathetically.
“And did your brother ever express any… frustration about the situation?”
“Sometimes,” Uncle Ray said. “He’d say it wasn’t fair. That Lila had been sick for so long, that none of them were really living anymore, that they were just treading water waiting for the end. He said he felt trapped. Like there was no way out.”
“Did he ever say he wanted to hurt Lila?” Voss asked.
Uncle Ray shook his head quickly. “Never. Not once. He loved that girl. He talked about her all the time—how brave she was, how strong. He would do anything for her. He just… he just couldn’t see a way to help her anymore.”
Voss let that hang in the air for a moment.
Then he turned to the judge.
“Your Honor,” he said. “What we have here is not attempted murder. It is a tragedy. A man who dedicated his life to caring for his sick daughter, who sacrificed everything for her, who finally broke under the unbearable weight of it all. Did he make a terrible mistake? Yes. Did he act out of anger and exhaustion and despair? Absolutely. But did he intend to kill his own daughter? The evidence simply does not support that.”
He paused, letting his words land.
“My client is not a monster,” he said. “He is a broken man. A man who needs help, not a prison cell. And I would ask this court to consider the possibility that what happened on Christmas Eve was not a cold, calculated plan to profit from a child’s death, but the desperate act of a father who had nothing left to give.”
He sat down.
I looked at Mom.
She was staring at Uncle Ray, her face white with shock.
He had not said any of that to her. He had not mentioned any of this when she had talked to him after Dad’s arrest. He had said he was horrified, that he could not believe what his brother had done.
And now he was in court, helping Voss paint Dad as a sympathetic victim.
The judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence to proceed to trial.
Dad was denied bail.
As the officers led him out of the courtroom, he looked back at us.
His gaze locked with Mom’s.
And for just a second, I saw it.
A flicker of something.
A signal.
Mom flinched.
Then she looked away.
After the hearing, I found Mom in the hallway, leaning against the wall, her face in her hands.
“He called me last night,” she whispered, without looking up. “From jail. He said Ray was going to testify, that it would help, that Ray was just trying to show the court what kind of man he really was. He said if I just stayed quiet, if I didn’t make things worse, everything would work out. He said he still loved me. That we could get through this together.”
I felt my blood run cold.
“You talked to him?” I said.
Mom looked up, her eyes red and swimming with tears.
“Just for a minute,” she said. “I didn’t tell him anything. I just… I just listened. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to believe him. For just a second, I wanted to believe that everything could go back to the way it was.”
“Mom,” I said, and my voice was sharper than I intended. “He tried to kill Lila. He tried to kill your daughter. And now he’s manipulating his own brother to lie in court to make himself look good. There is no going back. There is no ‘way it was.’ That man is gone. He never really existed. He was just a mask your husband wore to fool all of us.”
Mom started crying.
“I know,” she gasped. “I know that. But it’s not that simple. Twenty years of marriage, twenty years of building a life together—you can’t just turn that off like a switch. Some part of me still loves him. Some part of me still hopes that maybe, somehow, this is all a terrible mistake.”
She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“But I also know what he did,” she said, and her voice steadied. “I saw Lila in that hospital bed. I saw the bruises. I read the notebook. And I know that if I let him, if I give him even an inch, he will destroy all of us. So I’m not going to talk to him again. I’m not going to listen to his lies. I’m going to testify. I’m going to tell the truth. And I’m going to make sure he spends the rest of his life in prison.”
She looked at me, her eyes fierce now.
“Whatever Voss throws at us,” she said. “Whatever lies he tells, whatever dirt he digs up. We face it together. All three of us.”
I nodded.
And for the first time since Christmas Eve, I felt like we might actually win.
But Voss was just getting started.
The next week, he filed a motion requesting access to Lila’s complete medical records—every doctor’s visit, every hospital stay, every therapy session, every prescription she had ever taken. He argued that he needed them to “fully understand the context” of Dad’s actions, to show the jury just how overwhelming the burden of her care had been.
The DA fought it.
But the judge granted the motion.
Voss got everything.
And he started digging.
A week later, we found out what he had found.
He filed another motion, this one requesting that Lila undergo a psychological evaluation by a doctor of his choosing. He argued that Lila’s “history of mental health issues” and “tendency toward exaggeration and attention-seeking behavior” made her testimony unreliable. He cited a single therapy note from when Lila was sixteen, written after a particularly bad flare-up of her condition, in which she had described feeling “overwhelmed” and “like a burden on everyone.”
Voss had taken that one line, ripped it completely out of context, and was now trying to use it to paint Lila as mentally unstable, as a girl who would lie about her own father to get attention, to feel important, to finally be the center of attention in a way her illness had never allowed.
It was disgusting.
It was also effective.
The judge ordered the evaluation.
Lila was devastated.
“I can’t do this,” she said, pacing my apartment, her oxygen tube trailing behind her. “I can’t sit in a room with some doctor who’s already decided I’m crazy, who’s going to twist everything I say to make me look like a liar. I can’t relive all of it again just so Voss can use it against me.”
I grabbed her shoulders and made her look at me.
“Listen to me,” I said. “You are not crazy. You are not a liar. You are a survivor. And whatever that doctor says, whatever Voss tries to do, the jury is going to see that. They’re going to see you. They’re going to see how strong you are, how brave you are. And they’re going to know the truth.”
Lila’s eyes filled with tears.
“What if they don’t?” she whispered. “What if they believe him? What if they think I made it all up?”
“Then we’ll prove him wrong,” I said. “We have the notebook. We have the smart-meter logs. We have the bank records. We have the insurance policies. We have the truth. And the truth is going to win.”
She hugged me then, tight, and I held her, and for a moment I let myself believe it too.
May you like
But Voss had one more surprise.
And it was worse than any of us could have imagined.
