Phones die.

Elena and I had worked hard, since the split, not to turn every small thing into a fight, and I did not want to be the ex-husband who calls the police because a ten-year-old missed a couple of check-ins.

But underneath the reasonable things, quieter and more stubborn, was the other voice, the one that had been getting louder for months, and by Sunday morning I had stopped being able to talk over it.

Something was wrong at that house.

I had felt it for a while.

And I was done pretending I hadn’t.

Chapter 2 — The Things a Kid Doesn’t Say

Because there had been signs.

That is the thing I keep coming back to — that Maya had been telling me, in the way kids tell you things, which is almost never in words.

Elena had remarried a year earlier, a man named Julian who was, on the surface, everything you’d want: smooth, employed, attentive, good with a handshake, the kind of man who remembers to ask about your job and looks you in the eye while you answer.

I had wanted to like him, honestly.

It is easier on everyone when you like him.

But Maya changed around his name.

Not dramatically — nothing I could have taken to a lawyer — just a small closing, a shutting of some door in her face whenever he came up.