“Are we going back to the laundry room?”

I pulled all three girls against me. “Never.”

I sounded certain. Inside, I was terrified.

That afternoon a court-appointed social worker interviewed the girls separately, and a physician photographed every bruise on my body and dated each one.

Late that evening, someone knocked at the back entrance. Richard’s security guard brought in an elderly woman carrying a paper bag from a neighborhood bakery.

Her name was Evelyn Brooks, and she’d been the Whitmore family’s housekeeper for more than twenty-five years before she retired.