Part 5
The afternoon was reserved for documentation.
As a nurse, I know that emotions don't hold up in court, but medical records are written in stone. If Lauren wanted to fight me for the trust, I was going to build an unassailable mountain of evidence against her.
I took Grace to see Dr. Evans, her pediatric ophthalmologist. He had been managing her case since she was three years old, and he loved her quiet, gentle nature.
When we walked into the clinic, Grace was quiet, holding my hand tightly. She was wearing her backup glasses, but she kept looking down at her shoes.
"Hey there, Gracie," Dr. Evans said warmly as we entered the examination room. "Brought the backup pair today, I see. What happened to the main ones?"
Grace didn't answer. She looked at me.
"They were intentionally destroyed by a relative, Dr. Evans," I said clearly.
The doctor stopped writing on his tablet. He looked up, his brow furrowing. "Destroyed? What happened?"
"They were taken off her face and stepped on," I said, my voice clinical and precise. "Furthermore, she was forced to perform repetitive manual labor immediately afterward without her corrective lenses, causing significant eye strain and physical injury to her hands."
Dr. Evans’s face went pale, then darkened with a quiet, professional fury. He put down his tablet and wheeled his stool closer to Grace.
"Gracie, can I look at your eyes for a minute?" he asked softly.
She nodded.
He spent the next twenty minutes conducting a thorough examination. He checked her intraocular pressure, her visual acuity with the backup lenses, and used the slit-lamp to check for any acute strain or damage.
"There’s significant convergence fatigue," Dr. Evans noted, typing rapidly into his system. "And her tear ducts are inflamed, likely from prolonged crying while straining to see in low light. I'm documenting this as acute physical trauma secondary to deprivation of a medical device."
Next, I took Grace down the hall to the pediatric clinic, where my colleague, Dr. Ramirez, was waiting. She examined Grace’s hands.
The bruises were fully formed now—faint purple and blue marks across her small knuckles, the skin raw from the rough kitchen sponge and the chemicals Lauren had made her use.
"This is chemical irritation and soft tissue bruising," Dr. Ramirez said, her jaw tight as she took digital measurements of the marks. "On a seven-year-old child. Erin, this is an automatic CPS report. You know that, right?"
"I know," I said. "I want you to file it. Don't hold back. List Lauren Miller-Vance as the perpetrator and our parents' address as the location of the incident."
Grace looked up from the examination table, her eyes wide behind her thick lenses. "Mom? Is Aunt Lauren going to go to jail?"
I walked over and wrapped my arms around her, letting her lean her head against my shoulder.
"Aunt Lauren is going to face the consequences of what she did to you, sweetie," I murmured into her hair. "You don't ever have to worry about her hurting you again. I promise."
By the time we left the medical center, I had certified medical reports, official photographs entered into a hospital database, and an active Child Protective Services investigation opened against my sister.
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Lauren thought she was just playing a family game where she always won because she was the favorite.
She didn't realize I had changed the arena from our parents' living room to a legal battlefield. And in this arena, her tantrums meant absolutely nothing.
