My son sobbed the entire drive to his grandmother’s house. “Daddy, please don’t leave me here.” My wife snapped, “You’re babying him.” I left him anyway. Three hours later, a neighbor called. “Your little boy ran to my house shaking. He’s hiding under my bed and won’t stop crying.”

That night William sat by Owen’s bed after the boy fell asleep and looked at his face in the soft moon-shaped night-light glow. The child’s lashes were still damp from earlier crying. He had asked at dinner whether Grandma was dead and whether blood washed out of shoes. William had answered as honestly as he could and then spent ten minutes showing him with marker on his own hands that stains could fade, because Owen seemed fixated on the idea that visible traces meant permanent contamination.

Now William watched him breathe and thought of the photographs in Sue’s basement. Twelve children. Maybe more. A private archive of power.

He whispered into the darkness, not sure whether he was speaking to Owen or to the boy he himself had once been in foster rooms and strange beds: I am not looking away again.

The custody hearing in August was the first time William had seen Marsha in person since the night of the shed.