When you came back into the kitchen, your phone was buzzing again.
This time you answered.
Alec did not start with anger. That was the problem. He started with confusion, breathless and raw, like a man trying to sprint toward a disaster he had only been told about in fragments. “Where are you?” he asked. “I came back in and you were gone and my mother is saying you took some joke the wrong way and now nobody will tell me what actually happened.”
You looked at Lucy in your mother’s arms.
Her crying had finally subsided into those hiccuping little breaths babies take after they’ve screamed long enough to exhaust themselves. Your stomach turned over so hard it felt physical, like a hand twisting inside you. “Come here,” you said. “Come to my parents’ house, and I’ll show you.”
He arrived twenty-seven minutes later.
You knew because you watched the digital clock above the stove click through every minute, your body wound tight as wire, while your father paced between the kitchen and the front room muttering, “If that woman touched my granddaughter, I swear to God,” under his breath. When Alec finally came through the door, he looked wrecked, tie loosened, hair windblown, face drained of color. He kissed Lucy first without asking permission, the top of her small dark head, then looked at you like he was afraid of what your eyes might say before your mouth did.
“What happened?” he asked again, quieter this time.
You did not answer him with words.
You opened your phone, found the video, and pressed play.
