#was malcolm ten or eleven. eleven right? i'm rusty :/

[tyrannuspitch]

like part of what i'm getting at here is that ainsley must have been SUCH a lonely child. how was she having creepy, manipulative one-on-one encounters with not one but two malicious adults (watkins and sterling) apparently without anyone responsible for her knowing about it???

(and there must have been more to the sterling thing than we saw, right - how the fuck did he know what ainsley had been saying to her psychologist about the bruises on her arm? i find it hard to believe jessica was willing to talk to him... maybe it was evidence in the case, but if it was evidence, then it's even more unethical and probably-illegal for sterling to be speaking to ainsley at all. how is he even in their house??? fucked up and shady all around.)

anyway - this is speculative, but i think it would make a lot of sense for ainsley to have been somewhat neglected in the aftermath of martin's arrest. jessica was seriously struggling, and malcolm was more obviously traumatised and in need... and both jessica and malcolm were in and out of interrogations - in silent night (iirc) we saw malcolm getting interrogated, apparently not for the first time, alone in a police station like an adult even though he was literally eleven!! and obviously if your child is getting intimidated by cops like that you want to be as close as possible to support him and shout at whoever you need to to get him more age-appropriate treatment. but do you take your five-year-old along with you to do so? probably not...

anyway i'm rambling. this is just one scenario. but there will have been A Lot Of Shit going on with malcolm, and jessica already had a lot of her own shit to deal with, and i can imagine it would be pretty easy for ainsley to just fade into the background. not just her emotional wellbeing, but actually being physically present when you have so many other places to be, being literally there for her...

so maybe, pretty often, she was left alone, with someone vaguely keeping an eye on her (like, there is technically an adult with her in this huge mansion, but ainsley doesn't know them and they're not exactly skilled at childcare), and ainsley has to keep herself entertained, and then she wanders off chasing ghosts...

anyway. my point is that if ainsley was spending a lot of time either alone or around strange and sinister adults in the immediate aftermath of martin's arrest... that would REALLY feed her abandonment issues. like it's not just the sudden and total loss of martin. it's the sudden and partial loss of / new distance from... pretty much everyone.