“Children have such wild imaginations.”

I slid my phone across the small wooden table, the photographs of that second phone’s screen bright and unambiguous, and I watched the color drain out of my mother-in-law’s face.

“Did you go through my son’s private things?” she demanded — reaching, immediately, for my crime rather than hers.

“The messages appeared on the screen while he was at breakfast,” I said.

“How long, Charlotte?