Chapter 4 — THE FOYER
Two patrol cars, then a third.
An ambulance in the gravel with the back doors open.
They did not move me for eleven minutes. They put a board under me and a collar on me and they did all of it on that floor because a fourteen-foot fall at thirty-four weeks is not something you pick up and carry.
One medic on my arm.
One with a doppler on my stomach, and I want to say something about that sound.
It is the loudest thing in the world in a room made of marble.
They found her heartbeat at ninety seconds and it filled that entire foyer, bouncing off the stone, and everybody in that room stopped for a second — the cops, the medics, Roz on the steps — and I lay there on a backboard with a collar around my neck listening to my daughter's heart rate come back at a hundred and forty-four while her grandmother stood eight feet away with her arms folded.
Margot did not cry.
I have been asked about that by strangers on the internet, since, because parts of this ended up on the internet, and people find it very important.
She did not cry, she did not sit down, and she did not come near me.
What she did was talk.
She talked to the first officer for six minutes without being asked a question, and every single thing she said was later used against her, and none of it was a lie exactly.
She said I had been unsteady on my feet all through the pregnancy.
True. I had.
She said the stair carpet had been flagged as loose in a survey.
True. In 2021, on a different staircase.
She said I had been asked repeatedly to stop coming to the house.
Not true, and easily disproved, because I had a text from her from the previous January that said the guest room is yours as long as you need it, and because I had texted her forty minutes before I arrived and she had opened it and not replied.
She said I was emotionally unstable since Adam's death and had been treated for it.
That one was true and it was the one that nearly worked.
I was in grief counselling. I had been since March. I had a prescription for a sleep aid that has a warning about dizziness on the label, and Margot Halloway knew about it because I had told her about it at a kitchen table in that house in April while she made me a cup of tea and put her hand over mine.
Detective Yuki Bramwell arrived at 5:40 p.m.
I have met a lot of people since who told me what to expect from police in a case like this — that they would not believe me, that a family with a driveway that long does not get arrested.
That was not my experience and I am not going to pretend it was to make a better story.
Bramwell is about my height and she stood at the foot of the stretcher while they were loading me and she said four sentences.
"Mrs. Thorne, I'm going to ride with you."
"I'm not going to interview you tonight."
"I need one thing before the drugs, and then I'll leave you alone."
"Tell me the last full sentence you heard before you went over."
I said: "You don't belong here."
She wrote it down.
At the hospital, at nine that night, they took my statement properly.
At eleven, they took Emmett's.
At one in the morning, they arrested Margot Halloway in her own kitchen for assault in the first degree and assault on a pregnant woman, and Emmett Cole drove himself to the station in his own car to sign a written statement because he no longer had a job that came with a vehicle.