PART 2
I read it twice.
“Not involved in children’s care.” I’ve been to every pediatrician appointment those kids have ever had. I’ve held them for every shot. I’ve sat up with every fever.
The social worker, a calm woman named Mrs. Quarles, put her hand on my arm.
“Let’s go see your children,” she said. “Right now.”
Ava had a broken collarbone and a cut on her forehead. Archie had a bruise across his chest from his car seat strap. The doctor said the car seats had saved their lives.
When Ava saw me, she burst into tears.
“Mommy! Miss Ray was driving really fast. She was singing and she wouldn’t stop. I told her to slow down.”
I climbed into the hospital bed and held her as gently as I could.
Down the hall, Raylene was in Room 6 with a bandage on her hand, demanding to see “her kids.” Trooper Dial was standing in her doorway.
“Ma’am,” he said, “you’re not their mother. And you’re under arrest.”
Raylene was charged with DUI with children in the vehicle, two counts of child endangerment, and giving false information to medical staff.
Then the trooper turned to Logan.
He’d lied to me about where the kids were. He’d handed my children and my car to a woman he knew had been drinking. He’d changed their medical records to remove their own mother.
Mrs. Quarles, the social worker, opened a case with child protective services that night.
The next morning, I called a family lawyer. She got me an emergency custody order by noon.
Logan’s threat about the pharmacy didn’t go anywhere. I called my director myself and told her exactly what he’d said. She pulled every one of my records for the last five years.
Every single pill was accounted for.
“He picked the wrong pharmacist to threaten,” my director said.
The investigation found the rest.
Logan had been seeing Raylene for a year. She’d been picking the kids up from daycare on my long shifts. Logan had added her to the daycare list too. And the school. And the pediatrician.
He was building a paper trail. He planned to file for divorce in January and tell a judge I was “an absent mother who’d let another woman raise her kids.”
He was charged with child endangerment for knowingly letting an intoxicated driver transport the children.
Raylene pleaded guilty in the spring. Logan took a plea deal in the summer.
The divorce was final in August. I have full custody. Logan sees the kids every other weekend, supervised, and he’s not allowed to let anyone else drive them.
Ava’s collarbone healed. She still has a tiny scar above her eyebrow.
She says it makes her look tough.
Last month, I took the kids to their checkup. At the front desk, the receptionist asked me to update their emergency contacts.
Ava grabbed the pen out of my hand.
In big, crooked first-grade letters, she wrote:
“MOM: BETH ANN. THE ONLY ONE.”
THE END.
