It was the Monday night in March, at that dining table, when Sabina leaned across and put two fingers on the inside of his wrist and lowered her voice to something soft and reasonable and said:

“You trust that girl far too much.

She’s taking things — small things, nothing you’d miss, which is precisely the point.

And she is turning your daughters against us.

Slowly.

I’ve watched her do it.

I didn’t want to be the one to say it, my love, but you are going to wake up one day and find that your children love a paid employee more than they love their own father, and by then it will be too late to fix.”

He did not sleep that night.