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.
