Chapter 4 - The Paper Shield
The next forty-eight hours were a blur of fluorescent hospital lights, police reports, and legal filings.
Ava’s left arm was set in a bright pink fiberglass cast. She refused to sleep in her own bed, clinging to my sweater whenever I tried to step out of her bedroom. Every time a door clicked shut in the house, her little shoulders would tense up.
By Thursday morning, my attorney, Marianne, sat across from me in my living room, spreading out a thick stack of court documents over the coffee table. Dana sat in the armchair, nursing a mug of black coffee.
“Mark filed an emergency ex-parte motion at eight o'clock this morning,” Marianne informed us, her expression grave. “He’s requesting full emergency custody of Ava, citing an unsafe environment caused by Dana’s presence.”
“Unsafe environment?” I gasped, dropping my cup onto its saucer. “My sister saved her!”
“He’s leveraging the broken door,” Marianne explained. “His legal team is framing the incident as an illegal home invasion by a trained fighter, claiming Marissa was acting in self-defense against an intruder.”
“She was holding a hockey stick over a five-year-old in a locked bathroom before I even touched the front door,” Dana said coldly.
“I know that, and you know that,” Marianne sighed, rubbing her temples. “But Mark holds significant sway with Family Court Judge Henderson. They served on the state bar committee together. If we go into that courtroom tomorrow without ironclad proof of prior abuse, the judge might grant him temporary unsupervised visitation just to preserve 'parental rights' while the criminal case against Marissa sits in discovery.”
“Prior abuse?” I asked, my heart sinking into my stomach. “Mark never let her spend more than two days at a time with him until last month!”
“We need to dig into Marissa’s background,” Dana suggested, setting her mug down. “Women who snap like that on a five-year-old don't do it for the first time on a random Tuesday. She has a history.”
“I tried running a public records search,” Marianne said. “Her record in this county is completely clean.”
“Then we look outside this county,” Dana replied, pulling her laptop out of her gym bag. “I have contacts who do background checks for professional athletic leagues. If she lived in another state, or went by a maiden name, we’ll find it.”
My phone chimed on the table. It was a text message from an unknown number:
Drop the criminal charges against Marissa by 5 PM, or Dana gets arrested for felony burglary tonight. You have four hours.
May you like
Attached to the text was a photo of the police report Mark had filed with the precinct earlier that morning.
I stared at the screen, my breath catching in my throat. Mark wasn't just defending his girlfriend; he was actively using the legal system as a weapon to force me into silence.
