Chapter 13 - THE THIRD MISSING MAGNET
Police never proved what happened to all fourteen missing magnets.
Eleven removed surgically.
Emily saw one in stool two weeks earlier.
That made twelve.
Two missing.
One was later found under Derek’s desk.
Thirteen.
The last?
Unknown.
The prosecution resisted saying Noah had swallowed fourteen.
Good.
Uncertainty belonged in the case.
Noah said eleven forced ingestions he remembered.
Surgery found eleven.
One earlier may have passed and could have been among his count or separate.
Children count imperfectly under stress.
The defense tried turning that ambiguity into:
Noah fabricated.
But inconsistency is not invention.
It is often memory behaving normally.
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That lesson mattered later when Noah changed one detail about which day Derek used peanut butter.
Truth survived the change.
