The words hit harder than I expected. I had thought he might ask what happened. I had thought he might recognize the way Vanessa turned every disagreement into a performance. Instead he stepped between us, positioning himself as her shield. When I tried to speak, he raised a hand. I stopped, not because I agreed with him but because the man teaching me to stand by my word was refusing to hear mine.
Vanessa pressed her face against his shoulder. "I don't feel safe with him in this house," she whispered loudly enough for me to hear. She glanced at me, and for an instant the frightened expression vanished. What I saw underneath it was calculation.
Dad's voice dropped low. "You're eighteen now. If this is how you're going to behave, you can live somewhere else."
"You're throwing me out? Over something she says happened?"
"You need to leave before I lose my temper." He swallowed. "Get your things."
I wanted to tell him that I had spent years defending him to friends who couldn't understand why I still lived under Vanessa's rules. I wanted to ask whether one accusation could really erase eighteen years of being his son. Instead I asked the simplest question I could think of. "Did you actually see me touch her?"
"I don't need to see everything to know when somebody's hurt."
Behind him, Vanessa lowered her eyes. It looked like modesty. I recognized it as victory. Dad gave me fifteen minutes to pack, then started up the stairs with me as though I might steal something on my way out. I filled a duffel bag with jeans, two school shirts, my laptop, the charger, and my mother's picture. There wasn't room for the albums. I left the half-packed box in the living room and put the little wooden clock on my dresser, where Dad would have to pass it when he checked that I had gone.
On the landing I noticed the security camera above the living room arch. It was a small black dome installed the previous winter after someone took packages from the porch. Dad had asked me to help him connect it because the installer was running late. We had joked that the bright red indicator made the house look like a bank. Since then, the camera had been so ordinary that none of us paid attention to it. That afternoon, with the duffel digging into my shoulder, I saw its light blinking over the room where Vanessa had fallen backward on purpose.
"Dad," I said. "The camera. It might have recorded everything."
Vanessa's head snapped up. She looked at the ceiling. Her mouth opened without a sound. Then she caught Dad's sleeve. "I turned the alerts off because they kept waking us," she said quickly. "And the internet has been acting up. There's nothing useful there."
"Then let me show you," I said. "Please."
Dad shook his head. "We're done arguing."