1: 1

My husband and I had a huge fight.

He insisted on burning the new yellow dress I'd just bought, his voice edged with obsession.

"There can't be anything yellow in this house, or we'll all die!"

I thought he was talking nonsense. We snapped at each other for a while, then I shut myself in the bathroom to cool off.

But when I finished my shower and came out, the house was full of police.

Six bodies lay in the living room.

My mom and dad, my in-laws, my husband, and my five-year-old daughter. All of them dead.

Every face was frozen in terror, as if they'd seen something unspeakable in the moment before they died.

In my daughter's little hand, she was still clutching that yellow dress.

On the floor was a line of crooked words written in blood.

*Mommy killed us all.*

1

When the police stormed in, I still hadn't caught up with what was happening.

It wasn't until I saw my daughter collapsed beside the couch that I screamed and threw myself toward her.

"Nina!"

She was holding that yellow dress against her chest, her face drained of every trace of color.

I dropped to my knees, my hands trembling as I reached for her cheek.

"Nina, Mommy's out now."

"Didn't you say you wanted to sleep with Mommy tonight?"

"Stop playing. Open your eyes and look at Mommy."

There was still a little warmth left in her hand.

Like it was the last straw I could grab, I turned and cried out to the police:

"She's still warm!"

"Please, save her, she has to still be alive!"

The medical examiner crouched down, checked her for a moment, and gently shook his head.

I refused to believe it. I held my daughter's tiny body and called her name over and over.

Even when the police pulled me away by force, I was still fighting them.

As I struggled, my bare foot came down on the broken glass on the floor, and blood welled up instantly from my sole.

But I couldn't feel the pain.

All I could see was the white cloth covering my daughter's face.

Then my parents, my in-laws, my husband.

Six people in all.

I cried until I couldn't breathe, and finally I knelt on the floor, gagging.

The police sealed off the scene fast.

None of the six had any visible injuries, and there was no sign of a struggle in the house.

The medical examiner found vomit near several of their mouths and noses, and their first suspicion was poisoning.

But the door had been bolted from the inside.

Every window was shut, and the security bars hadn't been forced.

The camera at the entrance, from dinner all the way until the police arrived, hadn't caught a single outsider going in.

In this house, I was the only one still alive.

The detective in charge of questioning came over to me.

"Where were you when it happened?"

"The bathroom."

"How long were you in there?"

"About half an hour."

"Can anyone confirm that?"

I opened my mouth.

The people in this house who could have vouched for me were all lying on the floor.

I froze, then asked back, my voice hoarse.

"Why would I kill them?"

The detective didn't answer. He only asked:

"Before your shower, you argued with your husband?"

My eyes fell on that yellow dress.

"He insisted on burning the dress."

"He said there couldn't be anything yellow in the house, or we'd all die."

"I thought he was talking nonsense, so we snapped at each other."

The neighbor across the hall was soon brought in to answer questions.

She stood in the doorway in her pajamas, not daring to look into the living room.

"They really were fighting hard."

"The whole floor heard it."

The detective asked, "What did she say at the time?"

The neighbor hesitated and glanced at me.

"She said…"

"'It's just a dress. If you're all so afraid of dying, then just go die!'"

2: 2

2

The color drained out of my face in an instant.

It was only a line I'd blurted out in the heat of the moment.

But a few hours later, six people in my house were really dead.

The detective asked again, "How did the two of them get along, day to day?"

The neighbor sighed.

"They fought all the time."

"Sometimes you could hear things breaking in the middle of the night."

"Once her husband even said out in the stairwell that one day she'd drive him to his death."

I rushed to explain.

"It wasn't like that."

"Last time our daughter had a fever, he was frantic looking for the thermometer and knocked the cabinet over."

"Another time he was drunk, and I was helping him up when we broke the vase."

"We just didn't get along. I didn't kill anyone!"

But at that moment my explanations sounded so thin.

The cold handcuffs closed around my wrists.

The detective said in a low voice,

"For now, you are the only suspect in this case."

"Please come with us for questioning."

The lights in the interrogation room were a harsh white.

I sat in the chair, still wearing that bathrobe.

The wound on the sole of my foot had only been roughly bandaged, and the blood had already soaked through the gauze.

But I couldn't feel the pain at all.

All I could see was that small hand of my daughter's, sticking out from under the white sheet.

Before we left the house, I heard the medical examiner tell someone to put her into a body bag.

I broke free of the police right there and threw myself back over her, sobbing.

"Don't zip it. She's afraid of the dark."

"Please, leave a little light for her."

But in the end that zipper still closed, inch by inch, right in front of my eyes.

The detective set a family relationship chart down in front of me.

"You and your husband didn't get along?"

I nodded, then shook my head.

"We'd been fighting a lot lately."

"He had a temper, and his parents never liked me."

"But if you don't get along, you can get a divorce."

"Why would I kill anyone?"

The detective didn't answer.

"And your parents?"

The moment I heard those two words, the tears fell.

"They were the best people to me in the whole world."

My parents only had me, one daughter.

When I was little we were poor. My mother wrapped dumplings at a breakfast counter, and my father guarded materials at a construction site at night.

They couldn't bear to buy themselves a single new piece of clothing, but they never once let a teacher throw me out of class over unpaid tuition.

The year I started college, I was still three thousand short on tuition.

My mother sold the gold earrings she'd kept from her wedding.

My father was afraid that if I found out I wouldn't go to school, so he lied and told me the site had handed out a bonus.

It was only later that I learned the truth.

For a whole month he hadn't let himself buy lunch, getting by on the two rolls he brought from home in the morning.

When I got married, my in-laws looked down on my family for being ordinary.

My parents took out half a lifetime of savings and paid for the renovations on our marital home.

My mother also secretly slipped me a bank card.

She said,

"A woman needs her own money, even after she's married."

"Any day you're treated badly, you come home. Your father and I can still take care of you."

When I had my daughter, the labor was difficult, and I was in the delivery room for more than ten hours.

Outside, my father was so anxious his blood pressure spiked, but he refused to see a doctor.

My mother stood by the operating room door, begging the doctors over and over,

"Save my daughter first."

"Whatever happens to the baby is fine. I just want my daughter safe."

Parents who loved me that much.

And now they were lying dead in my house.

Without even one last word left for me.

I cried until I couldn't breathe, and all I could do was clutch the handcuffs.

"How could I possibly kill them?"

"They gave me everything they had to give."

"Even if I had no conscience, I could never raise a hand against my own parents!"

The young officer taking notes stopped his pen and glanced down at me.

But the detective across from me stayed just as calm.

"Your daughter—was she your biological child?"

3: 3

3

My head snapped up.

"What do you mean?"

"We have to confirm your relationship to every one of the victims."

"After the deaths, we ran an expedited kinship test."

He slid a report across the table toward me.

The results confirmed it: Nina was indeed the biological daughter of my husband and me.

I stared at that piece of paper, my fingers shaking so badly I could barely hold the report.

"Of course she's my daughter."

"I carried her for ten months. I nearly lost my life bringing her into the world."

Nina had weighed barely five pounds when she was born.

When the nurse laid her against me, she couldn't even open her eyes, but her tiny hand still curled instinctively around my finger.

The year she turned three, she started preschool for the first time.

She stood behind the railing crying for her mama, and I hid behind the wall and cried with her the whole morning.

When she ran a fever, she'd only sleep curled against my chest.

Even when my arm went numb and lost all feeling, I didn't dare shift her.

Just last night, she'd held up her crayons and asked me,

"Mama, when the yellow dress comes, will you put it on so I can see?"

"You'll look just like a princess in yellow."

But now that dress was clutched in her arms.

And she would never open her eyes to look at me again.

I lifted my head toward the detective across from me and asked, almost in a whisper,

"Do you have a child?"

He was quiet for a moment, then nodded.

"Yes."

"How old?"

"Six."

"Then could you bring yourself to kill him?"

The detective didn't answer.

The tears kept falling.

"You know how small a child looks when they're asleep."

"When she's got her arms around you calling you Mommy and Daddy, you can't even bear to raise your voice."

"How could I poison my own daughter with my own hands?"

"Even if my husband and his parents treated me badly, even if I hated them, I could have divorced him. I could have taken my daughter and gone home to my parents."

"Why would I kill the parents who loved me most and my own daughter along with them?"

The younger officer had stopped looking at me.

The interrogation room stayed silent for a long time.

At last the detective across from me spoke.

"Feelings can't be evidence."

"But we'll keep verifying what you've told us."

Just then the door of the interrogation room was pushed open.

An officer walked in carrying the kids' smartwatch and a recovered recording.

"This was found on one of the victims."

"Right before the deaths, the watch automatically recorded something."

The recording played. It was Nina's voice.

"Mama, this white powder, can I really put it in the fruit tea?"

A few seconds later, a woman answered,

"Yes."

"Good girl. Pour a little into every cup."

"Once they've all finished drinking, Mama will take you out to play."

My whole body went rigid.

The woman in the recording.

The voice was exactly, identically mine.