Their stepmother poured cold milk over two sisters until their father walked in.

My mother died three years ago. Cancer. The doctors said it was aggressive. That there was nothing they could do. She went fast. Six weeks from diagnosis to death.

We'd always believed it. The doctors. The tests. The funeral. The burial. It was real. It was final.

But the investigator—his name was Mark—he'd been looking into Denise's past. And he found something.

Denise had been a nurse. Before she met my dad. She'd worked at the hospital where my mother was treated. She'd been one of the nurses on my mother's floor.

She'd met my dad at the hospital. While my mother was dying.

That alone was creepy. But it got worse.

Mark found medical records. My mother's medication had been changed. The dosage of her pain medication had been increased. Dramatically. By a nurse. The nurse's signature on the medication log—D. Hargrove. Denise Hargrove. Her maiden name.

She'd been giving my mother more medication than prescribed. Enough to make her sleep. Enough to make her confused. Enough—maybe—to hasten her death.

I sat at the kitchen table, reading Mark's report, and my hands wouldn't stop shaking.

"Are you saying—" I couldn't finish.

My dad was white. He looked like he was going to be sick. "I'm saying it's suspicious. I'm saying we need to exhume her body. We need an autopsy. We need to know."

Ava was in the other room, watching TV. She didn't hear. I was glad. She was eight. She didn't need to know that her stepmother might have killed her mother.

We called the police. We called a lawyer. We called the hospital. We requested the medical records. We requested an exhumation.

The results came back six weeks later.

My mother's body had toxic levels of morphine in her system. Ten times the prescribed dose. It wasn't cancer that killed her. It was an overdose.

Homicide.

The police opened a murder investigation. The prime suspect? Denise.

She'd been there. She'd had access. She'd signed the medication logs. She'd started dating my dad within a month of my mother's death. She'd married him within six months. She'd been after his money. His house. His life.

And she'd killed my mother to get it.

I felt like the world was spinning. My mother. My beautiful, kind, loving mother. She hadn't died of cancer. She'd been killed. By the woman who'd lived in our house. Who'd poured milk on us. Who'd called us spoiled.

Who'd slept in my mother's bed. Worn my mother's clothes. Worn my mother's wedding ring.

I threw up. Then I cried. Then I got angry. So angry I could barely breathe.

Denise was arrested a week later. She was at a casino in West Virginia, with Frank. The police took her in handcuffs. She screamed. She lied. She said it wasn't her. She said someone else must have done it. She said my mother was already dying, that she was just "easing her pain."

But the evidence was overwhelming. The medication logs. The toxicology report. The timeline. The fact that she'd started dating my dad so soon after. The fact that she'd been stealing from us. The fact that she'd tried to take everything.