The First Stepdaughter
Chapter 08 - The First Stepdaughter
Detective Anand's investigation, expanding steadily over the following weeks, uncovered a detail neither Thomas nor Ruth had anticipated, a previous marriage in Renata's history, nine years earlier, to a man named Gregory Voss, whose young son from an earlier relationship, Caleb, had suffered through years of mysterious, recurring illness during Renata's marriage to his father.
"I want you both prepared for what I'm about to share," Anand said, calling Thomas and Ruth into her office together, the specific gravity of her tone suggesting this development carried weight considerably beyond what either of them had expected. "Renata was stepmother to a boy named Caleb Voss for nearly four years, prior to meeting you. He experienced repeated, unexplained illnesses throughout that entire period, according to his medical records, which I've since subpoenaed."
"What happened to him," Thomas asked, already dreading the answer.
"He survived," Anand said. "His illnesses stopped entirely once his father divorced Renata and gained full custody, nine years ago. The pediatrician who treated him during that marriage documented, at the time, a suspicion of medical child abuse, though the case was never formally pursued given insufficient evidence and the family's decision to simply separate rather than press charges."
Thomas sat with that revelation, understanding, with a specific horror, that Renata's pattern with Lily wasn't an isolated aberration but a repetition of something she'd apparently done once before, to a different child, in a different marriage, escaping formal consequence simply because the previous family had chosen distance over confrontation.
"I want to speak with Caleb," Thomas said. "If he's willing. I need to understand what actually happened to him."
Anand located Caleb Voss, now nineteen years old, attending college three states away, and arranged a careful, voluntary interview, Caleb agreeing to speak once he understood the specific danger currently facing another child under similar circumstances.
"I don't remember most of it clearly," Caleb told Anand, during the recorded interview, "I was young enough that a lot of it feels more like fragments than memories. What I do remember is being sick constantly, and Renata always being the one who took care of me, always telling everyone how hard it was, how exhausted she was. I remember feeling like being sick was the only time she really paid attention to me."
"Did the illnesses stop once you left her care," Anand asked.
"Almost immediately," Caleb said. "My dad always assumed I'd just been a sickly kid. It wasn't until years later, in a college psychology class, that I read about Munchausen by proxy and felt something click into place that I'd never had words for before."
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Thomas, reviewing the interview transcript later that evening, felt the full weight of Renata's pattern finally, completely crystallizing, considerably colder than he'd allowed himself to imagine even after everything else he'd learned this past month.
"Nine years ago," he told Casey, "and nobody stopped her. She just moved on to another family, another child, and started the exact same pattern all over again."
