Marco's Doubt
Chapter 06 - Marco's Doubt
The archived police report on Marco's father's death arrived three days later, considerably thinner than anyone had hoped, exactly as Cruz had warned, a brief investigation concluded within a week of the incident, the accidental ruling supported by minimal physical evidence and no formal interviews beyond a cursory conversation with Vivian herself.
"There's no mention of anyone else being present," Cruz said, reviewing the file with Marco and Mia together. "Vivian's statement says she was asleep when it happened, woke to the sound of the fall, and found him at the bottom of the stairs."
"Was that ever verified," Marco asked. "Her whereabouts."
"Not according to this file," Cruz said. "The investigating officers at the time appear to have accepted her account without significant scrutiny. Given the family's prominence in the community, that's unfortunately not unusual for cases like this from that era."
Marco sat with the file, the specific betrayal of learning his father's death had never been properly investigated in the first place, a rushed conclusion accepted partly, he suspected now, because of exactly the kind of respectability his mother had spent decades carefully cultivating.
"I don't know how to hold this," he told Mia that evening, both of them sitting in the hospital room that had slowly become less a crime scene and more simply the space where they were processing an entirely reconstructed family history together. "Twenty years believing one version of my father's death. Now wondering if I've been living my entire adult life next to the person who actually caused it."
"You don't have to resolve all of it tonight," Mia said, her own voice steadier now, though her body still carried the visible marks of what Vivian had tried to do to her days earlier. "This is going to take time. Real time, not just the time it takes to process one conversation."
"I keep thinking about every moment growing up when she comforted me about missing him," Marco said. "Every time she cried with me on his birthday, every time she talked about how much she missed him too. I don't know how much of that was genuine grief and how much was performance."
"Maybe both," Mia said gently. "People are rarely entirely one thing or the other, even people capable of something as terrible as what she did to me. That doesn't excuse it. It just means the full truth is probably more complicated than either version feels like right now."
Marco nodded, though the specific grief of that complexity sat heavy in his chest, a father he'd mourned honestly for two decades, and a mother whose comfort during that mourning might have been, at least partially, a performance covering an unthinkable secret.
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"I want the investigation reopened properly," he said. "Not just for Mia. For him too. He deserves an actual answer, twenty years late or not."
Cruz nodded, already having anticipated the request, the case file now expanding to include a possibility nobody had considered until four days ago in a rain-streaked recovery suite.
