It had been the fear that I wouldn’t believe her.

That was what my daughter was most afraid of, in the worst hours of her life — not the woman who had hurt her, but her own father, who had spent two years dismissing her every warning as jealousy.

She had gotten out of her apartment, gotten her son, gotten to the one adult she trusted completely, and even there, even safe on Sarah’s couch, she had wept because she thought her father was lost to her, married in his heart already to the woman who was robbing him.

Sarah told me that Emily had almost not sent Noah to the wedding at all — had almost decided it was hopeless, that I would side with Rebecca no matter what, that the evidence would only make me angry at her for gathering it.