It stings, it embarrasses, it makes for a bad evening and a story the guests will tell — but it heals, and it costs nothing that cannot be regained, and if that had been the whole of the reckoning, Amber would have been able to tell herself, in a year or two, that she had merely been the victim of a spiteful old man’s practical joke.

I could have left it there.

Part of me wanted to.

There is a clean poetic justice in the glue that appealed to the tired father in me: she planned it for my wife, she got it herself, the end.

But I had learned, that afternoon, that the glue was not the crime — it was only the confession, the small visible tip of a much larger and colder thing they had been doing in the dark.

And a man who settles for the poetic small justice, when he knows about the larger crime, has not protected his family.