“One day my little daughter told me, ‘Mom, every time Grandpa gives me a bath, he asks me to play a game. I have to close my eyes, and while they’re closed, he does something…’ I froze. The next day, I opened the bathroom door without warning… and what I saw made my legs start shakingr told me, ‘Mom, every time Grandpa gives me a bath, he asks me to play a game. I have to close my eyes, and while they’re closed, he does something…’ I froze. The next day, I opened the bathroom door without warning… and what I saw made my legs start shaking

Okay?”

She looked at me, confused.

“But Grandpa doesn’t do anything bad.”

That sentence should have reassured me. It didn’t. That night, I barely slept.

My father had always been the person I trusted most. Whenever my husband had to work late, Dad came over to help me.

Whenever Emily was sick, he could sit beside her for hours.

I had never seen anything that made me suspicious of him. But now my mind had taken one sentence and built a hundred

frightening possibilities around it.

The next morning, I started remembering little things that had never seemed important before. A few weeks earlier, Dad

had told me,

“You’re busy. I’ll get Emily ready for bed.”

Another time, the bathroom door had been closed. When I knocked, I heard both of them laughing. Back then, I had smiled.

Now the same memory felt completely different. All day, I