One small cruelty after another, stretching back through the months, each one witnessed by the little camera and by no one else, each one that I had reported and been disbelieved for reporting.

And somewhere in that long scroll of evidence Zachary understood the thing he had spent five years refusing to see: that there had never been a string of unlucky misunderstandings.

There had been a pattern.

He had built an entire household on top of it, brick by brick, and called it a family.

I had put that camera on the bookshelf almost a year before, and I want to be honest about why, because it is not a flattering reason.

I did not put it there to build a case.