“It was a harmless little idea, only to bring us closer—”

“Be quiet.” He had never in his life spoken to her in that voice, and it stopped her cold.

Tristan broke into real tears then, the terrified kind.

“Mom said if Charlotte left, we’d be a real family again!”

Chapter 16 — One Cruelty After Another

And then Zachary did the thing that finished him, which was to keep watching.

He pulled up the older footage, month after saved month of it, and what he found there took him apart.

He found the afternoon several months back when Tristan had deliberately stuck out a foot and tripped Chloe as she ran laughing through the room, so that she went down hard and struck her forehead on the sharp corner of the coffee table.