My Sister-In-Law Locked My Sick Daughter Out In The Cold Until I Remembered Where I Had Put The Key

I am forty-one years old and I run the boiler plant at a hospital in Ellery County, Illinois, which means I spend my working life making sure a building never gets cold. On the second Friday in November I came home with a unicorn cake and found my five-year-old lying on the patio stones behind my own house, and the woman who put her there was standing on the balcony above us with a yellow bucket in her hand. Everybody who has heard this story has told me what kind of woman she is. Nobody has yet let me finish the part about the key. This is the whole of it, chapter by chapter, from a cake in a box to a door with no keyhole in it.