Sweetheart, your mom can never know about this.”

My husband’s voice came out of the laptop speakers, low and tired.

I turned the volume down, even though nobody else was awake. Even though I was sitting alone at the kitchen table in the dark, with the house completely silent around me.

On the screen, our sixteen-year-old daughter, Ellie, was sitting behind the steering wheel of Patrick’s car. The little dashcam on the windshield caught both of them. The road outside, and the inside of the car, in that grainy green night-vision light.

Ellie was crying.

Not loud. Just tears running down her face while she held the wheel with both hands, even though the car was parked.

“Please don’t make me do it again,” she whispered.

Patrick stared straight ahead through the windshield. He didn’t look at her.

“We’ve come too far to stop now,” he said.

I hit pause. My hands were shaking so badly that I missed the button the first time.

The clock on the microwave said 2:17 a.m.

Patrick was asleep upstairs. In our bed. On his side, the way he always slept, with one arm under the pillow. I’d lain there next to him for three hours, listening to him breathe, before I finally got up and came downstairs.

He had no idea I’d found his secret.

And until that night, I would have trusted him with my life.

I would have trusted him with hers.

My name is Beatrice. Everyone calls me Bea. I’m forty-one years old.

I married Patrick when Ellie was five.

But Ellie’s story doesn’t start with Patrick. It starts with a man named Scott.

I was twenty-three when I met Scott. He was twenty-six. He was a bartender at a place downtown called The Anchor, where my friends and I went on Friday nights. He had dark curly hair and a dimple in one cheek, and he made a little fuss over me every time I came in. Remembered my drink. Remembered my name. Wrote it on a napkin with a heart next to it.

He was fun. That was the thing about Scott. He was so much fun. Everything was an adventure. Road trips on a Tuesday. Concerts in other states. Cooking breakfast at two in the morning.

I got pregnant eight months after we met.

He was happy about it. He really was. At least at first. He cried when he saw the ultrasound. He bought a tiny Cleveland Browns onesie and hung it on the refrigerator. He talked to my stomach every night.

Ellie was born in October. On a rainy Tuesday morning. Seven pounds, two ounces. She had his dark curly hair. He held her in the hospital and said, “I’m going to be the best dad in the world. You’ll see.”