On our wedding night, I eased the wedding dress from my wife’s shoulders—and stopped cold when I saw the long scars running across her body. “Who did this to you?” I whispered. She started to shake.

“My stepfather. He always said no one would ever believe me.” I kissed her forehead and picked up the phone. By the time the sun came up, the police had his recordings, his accounts were frozen, and the man who had tormented her for years was on his knees, begging us to forgive him.

The first time I saw the marks hidden beneath my wife’s gown, the music from the reception was still drifting up through the floor of the Grand Summit Hotel. By morning, the man responsible for them would be in handcuffs.

Sophia stood in front of me in the bridal suite, trembling under the warm light of the chandelier. Only a moment before, she had been glowing while I worked the row of pearl buttons loose along her spine.

Then the ivory fabric slid down from her shoulders, and I went completely still. Pale lines stretched across her ribs, her waist, the flat of her shoulder blades.

A few were thin and faint. Others were rough and uneven. But every last one of them had plainly been there for years.

“Who did this to you?” I asked quietly, my voice tightening around a dread I hadn’t felt coming.

Her face broke as she turned away from the mirror. “It was my stepfather. Mason,” she choked out.

The words had barely left her mouth before she wrapped her arms around herself. “He always told me nobody would ever take a kid’s word over a man like him,” she went on.

“My mother sided with him every single time I tried to say something. And whenever I said I’d call the police, he swore he’d ruin me and everyone I cared about.”

I pulled a heavy velvet robe around her shoulders and drew her against me. A cold, deliberate anger was moving through me, but I kept my voice level.

“Did he ever actually admit to any of it?” I asked, smoothing her hair.

She gave a small nod against my chest. “Sometimes he’d call late at night, years afterward. He liked reminding me that my silence belonged to him.”

“Do you still have any of those calls saved?” I asked.

Her eyes went wide. “How did you even know to ask that?”