If Nell had not spoken to me on the Tuesday, a counselor named Marguerite Obeng would have spoken to her on the Monday, and this would have come apart six days later through a mandated report and a Department of Children and Families intake and a police interview, with me learning about it from a caseworker on my doorstep.

Which would have been, in almost every respect, a worse version.

Except in one, and it is the one that keeps me honest: in that version, my daughter would not have had to be the one who said it.

Part Eight: What Happened in Naples

At eight o’clock that night, with Nell asleep and my wife not home and not answering, I sat down at the kitchen island with a laptop and I typed my father-in-law’s name into a search engine.

It took four minutes.