Chapter 5 - The Trial of TruthThe court hearing was a circus of Lourdes’s making. She arrived with a high-priced attorney, wearing a beige dress that made her look like the picture of innocence. She spent the morning claiming I was a neglectful, absent father who had orchestrated this entire scenario to win a custody battle.
Then, Austin called the first witness.
It wasn't me. It was Detective Rick Freeman.
He played the video.
The courtroom, which had been buzzing with chatter, fell into a silence so deep it felt like a vacuum. When the image of Sophie kneeling on the rice appeared on the giant monitor, the judge, a woman who usually kept her emotions locked away, leaned forward, her face turning pale.
Lourdes started to protest, "It's out of context! You don't understand the tradition!"
The judge silenced her with a look of pure, concentrated fury.
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Then came the audio. I had managed to recover a recording from a smart-home device that had been active in the kitchen the night before the video was taken. It was Lourdes’s voice. "She needs to bleed, Ricardo. She needs to know that her imagination is a weakness."
Lourdes didn't have an answer to that. She collapsed into her chair, her facade finally, irreparably shattering.
