And then my whole world, the family world I’d spent my whole life building, just turned its back on me all at once. Megan took the kids and moved three hours away and changed her number.

My sister Diane stopped speaking to me, won’t even look my way at funerals now, and we’ve buried two people since. My brother Gary called me up and said, “You should’ve handled that within the family, Bee. We don’t call the law on our own.” Within the family. Like there’s a family way to cook poison next to sleeping children.

The worst one came last Christmas. My phone rang and it was a number I didn’t know, and it was Ellie. My granddaughter, seven now. She was whispering, like she’d snuck the phone. “Grandma?” Lord, I about dropped to the floor just hearing her little voice.

“Hi, baby. Hi. I miss you so much.”

And then she said it. Whispering. “Grandma, why did you do that to Daddy?”

I tried to keep my voice from breaking. “I did it to keep you safe, sweetheart. To keep you and your brother safe.”

There was a quiet, and then she said, “Mommy says you’re the reason our family is broken.” And then a click. That was it. That was the whole call. I held that dead phone against my ear for I don’t know how long.

I haven’t seen those babies in two years. Danny won’t put my name on the visitor list at the prison. Mason’s feet healed up just fine, I heard that secondhand, thank God. He’s five now and he doesn’t remember any of it. He doesn’t remember the burns or the smell or me carrying him out of that house.

All he knows, all anybody tells him, is that Grandma called the police on Daddy.

So now you know everything except the one thing. The thing nobody in my family will say to my face, and the thing I’ve never been able to say to theirs.

The reason I didn’t hesitate. The reason I didn’t pray on it for a week. The reason I will be the villain in this family until the day they put me in the ground, and I’ll take it.

In 2004, when Ray’s house went up, I was the first one there. I beat the fire trucks. And I went in. I don’t even remember deciding to, I just did. And I found Katie. My Katie. Four years old, in the back room, on the floor.