But I did not do it to protect my daughters.

I did it because a woman I trusted had convinced me to suspect a woman I should have trusted, and I went hunting for a villain who did not exist while the real one stood beside me at the dinner table, pouring my wine.

My instinct, that something was wrong, was correct.

My aim was catastrophically off.

And I have come to believe that this is one of the most dangerous things a suspicious mind can do: to correctly sense that something is wrong, and then, guided by a manipulator, to point that correct instinct at exactly the wrong target.

Chloe did not create my vigilance out of nothing; some part of me, I think, already sensed a wrongness in my home, a tension I could not name.

What she did, brilliantly and evilly, was to seize that vague, accurate unease and aim it at Marisol, so that my genuine instinct to protect my family became the very weapon she would use to remove my family’s protector.

Had it worked, had the cameras somehow confirmed her lie instead of exposing it, I would have fired the one good adult in my daughters’ lives and married the one dangerous one, and I would have done it believing, the entire time, that I was protecting my children.

That is the thing that still makes my blood run cold.

My love for my daughters, my instinct to guard them, was itself being turned into the instrument of their betrayal.

It was only luck, and thirty cameras, that pointed my suspicion at the truth instead of the lie.

Chapter 2 — You Trust Marisol Too Much

Forty-five minutes after my SUV rolled out through the wrought-iron gates of my estate in Bel-Air, I slipped back onto the property through a hidden service entrance, alongside Hector, my head of private security.

No one inside the house could know I had returned, and so we moved in silence, like intruders in my own home.