I watched them once, all of them, and once was a wound I will carry.

I will only tell you what they proved: that for a year my mother had turned my wife into a servant and filmed it for her own amusement — Aurora on her knees with a toothbrush at the baseboards while my mother’s voice mocked her from above; my exhausted five-year-old set to labor no child should be handed, told that toys had to be earned.

And one clip, only eighteen seconds long, of Elodie sitting on the laundry-room floor, crying without sound, too tired and too frightened to make a noise, while my mother’s voice told her to stop before her father got home.

That was the one that put me on my knees in the bathroom, sick, because I understood at last that the silence I had mistaken for peace had been the silence of two people who had learned that crying only made it worse.

What sickened me most was not any single act.

It was the fact of the camera.