You stand beside her.
“So are you.”
She gives you a small look. “So are you.”
You don’t argue.
Because the truth is, the cameras didn’t just expose Patricia. They exposed the architecture that let her operate so comfortably in the first place. They showed you how easily absence can wear the costume of provision. How doubt, once welcomed, starts rearranging love until fear looks reasonable. How children adapt to cold faster than adults notice, and how the person everyone least values is sometimes the one holding the whole emotional roof up by hand.
On the flight home, Daniela sleeps with her head against your shoulder.
Martina sleeps across Rosa’s lap.
And you sit there high above the Atlantic with your daughters breathing softly against the people they trust most, thinking the same thought that chilled you in the monitoring room the first day and then changed its meaning forever.
Patricia was right about one thing.
The dangerous person in your house was not the woman your daughters ran to.
It was the one who taught them to be afraid of running anywhere at all.
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