I don’t have a clean way to describe what that felt like. Greg’s hand came down on top of mine on the table. I remember looking at it and thinking that was nice of him.

My brain was doing that thing where it processes small things because it can’t process the big one yet. Melissa’s boyfriend. Someone she brought into our house, around our daughter, while I was paying her $15 an hour and she was texting me pictures of Callie eating goldfish crackers.

They arrested Melissa that evening. I don’t know the full legal details of what she was charged with because honestly every time I try to read the documents my brain slides off the words. What I do know is that she knew. She absolutely knew. You do not tell a four-year-old to keep a secret from her daddy unless you know, somewhere in the part of yourself that still has a conscience, that what’s happening is wrong.

Callie has been seeing a therapist since then. A good one, someone who specializes in kids, who uses play and drawing and doesn’t push her to talk about things directly. The flinching has mostly stopped. Mostly. She still does it sometimes when something moves fast near her head and every single time it happens I have to go somewhere quiet for a few minutes afterward. Greg and I are both in therapy too, separately and sometimes together. We’re okay. We’re trying.

Dana from church apologized. Cried, actually. I believe she didn’t know. I do. But I also haven’t gone back to that church since, and I’m not sure I will. That probably says something about me that I haven’t fully worked out yet.

I’m writing this because someone in a parenting group I’m in asked about nanny cams and whether they were worth it and whether people felt weird using them.

I felt weird using it. I felt like I was being paranoid and distrustful and like I was treating someone unfairly before they’d done anything wrong. I bought it anyway because something felt off and I couldn’t explain it and I didn’t fully trust my own instinct enough to act on it any other way.

If you are reading this and something feels off, please trust that feeling. Get the camera. Feel weird about it. Do it anyway.

Callie is fine. She is sitting ten feet from me right now drawing horses, which is her whole personality these days, horses and the color orange. She doesn’t talk about Melissa. I don’t know if she remembers much or if she’s just decided not to. Kids do that sometimes, the therapist says. They find their own way of moving forward.

I’m still working on mine.