“You should trust your family a little more, Lucy.” We had security cameras installed, at the front gate and in the kitchen, and I had been checking the feeds.

And shortly after that phone call, my phone stopped receiving the feed notifications entirely.

When I asked, George had an explanation ready: Fiona’s contractors, he said, had accidentally severed a main line during the salon expansion.

I wanted to believe him.

That is the thing I keep returning to, with a kind of grief: how much I wanted to believe him, how hard I worked to explain away each warning sign, because the alternative, that the man I had married was doing something to my daughter, was too terrible to hold.

So I believed him, for a little while longer.