The Recording

My sister, Paige, had never trusted Diane with Leo — not since the first time she'd babysat and Paige noticed the nursery cloud footage had gaps in it, hours at a time with no video saved. So two weeks earlier, without telling me, she'd started downloading a backup copy every time she visited, just in case.

She pulled it up on her phone with hands that weren't quite steady either.

The first clip was from three nights before, timestamped 9:14 p.m. — a night Colin had told me he was working late. It was Diane, alone in the nursery, and Colin's voice coming through on speakerphone.

"You need to let me handle him the way I handled you when you were a baby," Diane was saying. "Soft parents raise soft kids."

And then Colin's voice, tired, resigned, but unmistakably his.

"Fine. Just don't leave marks this time, Mom."

This time.

I must have made a sound, because Colin's face had gone the color of old paper.

"Sienna, that's not — I meant marks from the crib rail, he'd been chewing on it, I wasn't talking about—"

"Don't," I said, and it came out exactly the way it had come out at Diane twenty minutes earlier. "Don't you dare finish that sentence like it makes it better."

Paige kept scrolling. There was a second clip, older, from a visit six weeks ago — Diane again, this time complaining to Colin's sister on a call about how "soft" the parenting had gotten in this family, and mentioning, almost offhand, that Colin himself had a scar on his hairline from when he was two that "nobody talks about anymore."

Colin wasn't looking at either of us now. He was staring at the carpet where Leo had landed an hour earlier, and for the first time since he'd walked through the door, something like understanding was breaking across his face — not about what his mother had done to our son.

About what had apparently been done to him.