“Mommy, why does Grandpa watch me take a bath?” Lily asked.

She was five. She was sitting at our green laminate kitchen table, carefully dipping a dinosaur-shaped chicken nugget into a pool of ketchup. Her small fingers were sticky.

The clock on the wall was ticking loudly, its plastic frame slightly crooked.

My fork stopped halfway to my mouth. I couldn’t draw a breath for a second. The air in our cozy kitchen suddenly felt very thick, smelling faintly of roasted garlic and dish soap.

“What do you mean, sweetheart?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light.

My husband, Greg, was sitting opposite me. He was cutting his pork chop with neat, methodical strokes. He didn’t look up, but his shoulders went tight immediately.

“When I stay at Grandpa’s on Wednesdays,” Lily said, her little voice bright and completely innocent. “He sits on the toilet and watches me in the tub. He calls it the watching game.”

I looked over at Greg. He kept chewing, his jaw working slowly. He put his napkin down on the table, folding it into a perfect, neat rectangle. He was always so precise with his napkins.

“She’s exaggerating, Claire,” Greg said calmly, his voice flat. “You know how she is. She probably means he stands by the door to make sure she doesn’t slip.”

“He gives me a candy after,” Lily added, her tongue blue from some juice she’d had earlier. “The gold one. He calls it the good girl candy.”

Werther’s Originals.

My stomach dropped into a cold, dark pit. My father-in-law, Arthur, always had his pockets full of them. He was seventy-one years old, a retired Sunday school teacher at Grace Lutheran, and a man the entire town of Parma, Ohio, treated like a saint.

He had babysat Lily every single Wednesday for the last two years while Greg and I worked our shifts. I worked as a receptionist at a local pediatric dental clinic, sorting paper charts and arguing with insurance companies. Greg worked at the auto plant.

Arthur had been our lifesaver. Or so I had thought.

I sat there staring at my daughter’s sticky fingers, my brain completely unable to process the words she had just spoken. I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to believe Greg. I wanted to believe that our daughter was just confused.

But the gold candy detail felt too specific. It felt like a physical weight pressing down on my chest.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Greg muttered, picking his fork back up. “Let’s not make a big deal out of a five-year-old’s imagination.”

I didn’t argue with him. I knew Greg’s father was his hero. Arthur was the man who had raised Greg alone after his mother died, the man who had bought our first lawnmower as a housewarming gift.

Instead of fighting, I waited until Greg went to sleep that night. I sat on the couch in the dark, my phone screen illuminating my face. I opened the Amazon app.