Chapter 5: Bypassing the Barrier
By Friday, the situation had evolved into a war of attrition between myself and the dog. Daisy refused to eat her kibble. She spent every waking hour sitting directly outside the closed nursery door, scratching at the wood until the paint began to flake off.
When my husband suggested that maybe Daisy was picking up on a pest infestation—mice or rats running through the wall cavities—I immediately called an exterminator. The inspector spent an hour checking the attic, the basement, and the exterior perimeter of our house. His conclusion was definitive: Zero signs of rodent activity. No droppings, no chew marks, no entry points.
Frustrated and running on less than three hours of sleep a night, I decided to fortify the nursery. I went to a local hardware store and purchased a heavy-duty, pressure-mounted steel baby gate. I installed it securely in the doorway of the nursery, leaving the heavy wooden door open so I could easily hear Lily's breathing while keeping Daisy physically barred from the room.
It was a useless gesture.
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That very evening, while my husband and I were downstairs attempting to eat a frozen dinner, we heard a catastrophic crash from the upper floor. It sounded like an iron frying pan slamming onto a concrete floor. We ran up the stairs to find the heavy steel gate ripped completely out of its wall mounts, the drywall anchors torn out like loose teeth.
Daisy had not only bypassed the barrier; she had already wedged herself back behind Lily's crib. She was working on the wall with an amplified, terrifying ferocity. The pink floral wallpaper was entirely gone now, replaced by a jagged, gaping wound of gray plaster and exposed paper tape.
