Marcus stayed on one knee, holding his daughter’s small hands, and he made himself keep his face calm, and his voice gentle, even as the weight in his chest turned to something colder and heavier.

Because he believed her.

That was the first and most important thing, the thing on which everything else would turn, and it happened in an instant, before he had a single piece of proof: he believed his daughter.

He did not think, as some fathers might, that she was exaggerating, or confused, or making up a story about a stepmother she resented.

He looked into his six-year-old’s frightened, careful, whispering face, and he knew, with a certainty that arrived from somewhere deeper than reason, that she was telling him the truth.