Every claim Gideon was about to make about being the devoted primary caregiver, contradicted in his own hand, on his own camera, in the clearest possible light.

There is a bitter irony in that footage that I have never gotten over.

Gideon put that camera up himself, years earlier, when Roger was a baby just learning the stairs — put it up out of love, or what I’d believed was love, a father worried his son might tumble in the night.

It was meant to keep our child safe.

And it sat there in the upstairs hall for years, a small unblinking guardian, and then one night it recorded the very man who’d installed it walking that same child down those same stairs and abandoning him at the bottom.