Standing before me were her husband Nicholas Ferguson, his mother Patricia, and his smug older brother Gregory.
Each of them wore thousand-dollar business suits along with luxury watches that gleamed beneath the unforgiving fluorescent lights inside the hospital room.
Their faces carried those polished, superior smiles belonging only to people convinced they owned everyone around them.
Patricia adjusted her sparkling diamond earrings before looking directly at me with a smirk carefully designed to make me feel unimportant.
“Colonel Gardner, I am afraid your daughter has had another one of her little emotional episodes tonight,” she said, her voice sounding like ice.
She lazily gestured toward Abigail, whose trembling fingers were gripping the front of my uniform jacket with every ounce of strength remaining.
“She simply fell down the stairs in our foyer, and nobody in this room touched her,” Patricia continued, lying as effortlessly as someone who had never heard the word no.
Abigail clung to me even tighter before lifting terrified eyes toward my face.
“That is not true Mom, they locked me inside the basement guest suite for three days without food,” she sobbed.
