I scrambled up and ran to her door and pounded on it, sobbing her name, and there was no answer.

And when I turned, David was standing at the end of the hall, holding our sleeping daughter, and on his face was a guilt so heavy that I understood a second terrible thing all at once.

“You knew,” I said.

He couldn’t meet my eyes.

“Not everything, Laura.”

It came out of him in pieces.

Weeks earlier, he had found blood-stained towels in the laundry.

My mother had caught him holding them, and she had begged him — begged him, on her feet in our laundry room — not to tell me.