“Rachel can’t afford expensive clothes on a third-grade teacher’s salary,” Vanessa said on the video, setting down the glass pot.

“Then Rachel and Emma will stay home,” Patricia replied without looking up from her planner.

“We’ll tell your father Emma has a fever.

I won’t have our family portraits looking ordinary.”

The thirty-five years I’d spent trying to please my mother, smoothing over her cruel words and telling myself she loved my daughter just as much, dissolved into perfect clarity there in room 104.

“Has my father seen this clip too?” I asked Detective Mitchell.