Chapter 7 - PRACTICE QUESTIONS
Quincy called them “the game.”
Dr. Harlow’s appointment had never happened.
But Dorcas had practiced.
The child specialist asked:
“What game?”
“Questions.”
“What questions?”
“Who makes you sad?”
“What did you say?”
“Grandma said Mommy.”
“Did you say Mommy?”
Quincy shook his head.
“I said fire trucks.”
Despite everything, the specialist almost smiled.
“What else?”
“Who yells?”
“Who did you say?”
“Mommy yells sometimes.”
True.
I had raised my voice.
Not often.
Enough.
“Did Grandma tell you what to say?”
“She said remember when Mommy yelled at Daddy.”
I remembered.
Three weeks earlier.
Everett had come home at 2:00 a.m.
I yelled in the kitchen.
Quincy woke.
I apologized the next morning.
Dorcas turned it into curriculum.
Another question:
“Where do you want to live?”
Quincy:
“My room.”
“Did Grandma want another answer?”
He nodded.
“Daddy house.”
Denver.
He had never seen it.
The specialist stopped there.
Enough.
The pattern was clear.
Not proof of every legal allegation.
Enough for court concern.
Then Everett admitted he knew about “practice.”
Not the exact wording.
He said Dorcas told him she was preparing Quincy so he would not be nervous with Dr. Harlow.
“Did that sound appropriate to you?” Naomi asked during deposition.
“No.”
“Then why allow it?”
“I thought my mother understood these things better than I did.”
“Why?”
“She had gone through custody litigation with my sister years ago.”
Interesting.
Everett had an older sister, Caroline, who had divorced and moved away.
I barely knew her.
Dorcas always said Caroline “abandoned the family.”
Naomi found her.
Caroline Wexley Grant.
Forty-one.
Oregon.
She agreed to speak.
Her first sentence:
“My mother tried to do the same thing with my daughter.”
My stomach dropped.
Not fire.
Not physical intimidation.
But scripted questions.
During Caroline’s divorce, Dorcas repeatedly asked her granddaughter whether Daddy yelled.
Whether Mommy left her alone.
Whether she wanted to live with Grandma.
Caroline cut contact.
Dorcas spent years telling everyone Caroline was unstable.
Pattern.
Not a criminal conviction.
No prior court finding against Dorcas.
But Caroline had emails.
One from fourteen years earlier:
Children repeat what becomes familiar. Stop acting like repetition is manipulation.
Dorcas had been telling herself the same lie for more than a decade.
Caroline also told me something else.
“Our father left a trust.”
I stared.
“What does that have to do with custody?”
“I don’t know if it still does.”
There it was.
Money.
Not yet the answer.
“Everett never told you?”
“No.”
Caroline laughed without humor.
“Of course he didn’t.”
Then she said:
May you like
“Ask who controls Quincy’s beneficiary distributions if Everett becomes primary residential parent.”
And for the first time, I understood that Denver might not be the only destination Everett had planned for our son.
