In our minds, Penny was a victim as well as Ava. Her own mind had turned on her; we just needed to make her see.

“I can’t go back to Park City,” I said. “I shouldn’t go back.”

“Honey, it’s fine,” my mom said. “We’ll keep you posted. You don’t need to stay.”

I went to take a shower and found myself screaming, the echoes ricocheting off the walls and bringing my poor parents running to the bathroom door. This syndrome was the only thing that made the last ten years of life with Penny make any sense at all, and yet, how could this be true? Where did we go from here?

The next day, in what I now recognize as a stunning act of bravery, my mother went to speak to Ava’s pediatrician, her third in as many months. My mom filled him in on Penny’s troubling history with illness, and most crucially, the pregnancy, which, my parents at last explained to me, had likely never been real. The doctor appeared to calmly absorb the information, and my mom left his office frustrated and fearful that he didn’t believe her. What she didn’t know was that he legally couldn’t tell my mother how deeply alarmed he was and that once she’d left his office, he’d alerted a hospital authority called the SCAN team—a task force of doctors at Children’s that handled suspected child abuse and neglect—who’d subsequently called Child Protective Services. But this would all come out later.

It was Stewart who called me in Park City, his voice hysterical. “Katie, they took Ava, they took Ava. Oh my god, oh my god.”

At first, Penny cried to us too, but as the details burbled forth, she quickly turned. My mother’s name was all over the paperwork as the person who’d alerted the doctors. And for all of us, there was no going back.

Liz Says Yes