Rory had commented under it.

Right there. The first comment. Posted eight minutes after the picture went up. Four hours after he told our daughter he couldn’t swing a dress.

Beautiful girl. So proud. ❤️

I lay there in the dark and read it three times.

Beautiful girl. So proud.

I tried to remember the last time Rory had commented on a picture of Sadie. I scrolled back on his page. I went back a month. Two months. Six.

Nothing. Not one comment. Not on her homecoming picture in September. Not on her picture with her volleyball trophy in November. Not on the picture I posted on her seventeenth birthday in January.

He’d hearted a few of them. That was all. A little red heart, no words.

I heard Sadie’s door close very softly.

Across the hall. I’d thought she was asleep. Her light had been off for an hour. But I heard her door open, and I heard her go into the bathroom, and I heard the water run.

Then I heard her door close again. Very softly. The way you close a door when you don’t want anybody to know you were awake.

She’d seen it.

Of course she’d seen it. She’s seventeen. Her phone is her whole world. She follows Tasha. She follows Madison. She follows her dad.

She saw her stepsister in a six-hundred-dollar dress. And she saw her father’s comment underneath.

Beautiful girl. So proud.

I got up. I stood outside her door in the dark hallway with my hand on the doorknob.

I could hear her breathing on the other side. Not crying. Just breathing. Slow and careful, the way you breathe when you’re trying very hard not to cry.

I didn’t open the door.

I went back to bed. I lay there until two in the morning staring at the ceiling.

Chapter Three: Eleven Years

I did not call him.

I want that understood. I had my phone in my hand at two in the morning with his name pulled up. My thumb was right over the call button. I could have called him and woken him up and said everything I’d been holding in for eleven years.

I didn’t.

I have been divorced from Rory for eleven years, and I know every way that call goes.

I know exactly how it goes if I call him angry. He gets defensive. He says I’m always trying to make him the bad guy. He says I don’t understand how hard it is. He says Tasha’s money is Tasha’s money and he doesn’t control what she spends it on.

Then he hangs up. And then he doesn’t call Sadie for two weeks. And Sadie thinks it’s her fault.

I know exactly how it goes if I call him calm. He agrees with everything I say. He says he’ll fix it. He says he’ll call Sadie. He says he’s sorry.

Then he doesn’t. And Sadie thinks it’s her fault.

Rory and I got married when we were twenty-two. In the Lutheran church in Howard, where his mother did the hair of every woman in town. Sadie was born when we were twenty-five.

He was a good husband for about five years. He was a welder at a trailer manufacturer in Madison. He was funny. He could fix anything. He used to put Sadie on his shoulders at the county fair so she could see the tractor pull.

Then he started staying late at the bar after work. Then he started not coming home. Then, when Sadie was six, I found the messages from Tasha on his phone.

We were divorced eight months later.