I set up the camera to check on my baby during naptime, but what I heard shattered me first: my mother snarling, “You live off my son and still dare to say you’re tired?” Then, right beside my child’s crib, she grabbed my wife by the hair.

“Postpartum women can be fragile,” she said coolly. “I was trying to help her snap out of it.”

I stared at her in disbelief.

“By grabbing her hair next to my son’s crib.”

“She provokes me and talks back,” Carol snapped.

“No,” I said firmly. “You intimidate her and when she reacts you call it instability.”

Her expression hardened instantly. “She has turned you against your own mother in less than a year,” she said bitterly.

“No,” I replied quietly. “The footage told me everything.”

Then Sarah whispered something that changed everything in the room. “She told me if I ever left Mason alone with her and came back to find him hurt nobody would believe it was not my fault.”

For a moment the air seemed to disappear from my lungs.

“That is not what I meant,” my mother snapped defensively.

But the damage was done because suddenly every strange moment over the past months made horrifying sense.

Every time Mason cried harder in her arms. Every time Sarah refused to leave the room when my mother held him. Every time she stayed awake even while exhausted.

I picked up my sleeping son and turned toward my mother. “Pack a bag,” I said.