"I'm a mandated reporter. I have to file."
"Then file it."
But that was only the beginning of what he'd find.
That evening, after the children were asleep, Thomas remembered something Clare had shown their daughter a lifetime ago: a loose board under the window seat in Emma's room, a hiding place for treasures. Clare had been a girl who kept secrets, and she'd wanted her daughter to have somewhere private in a house full of adults.
Thomas knelt on the floor and pried it up. Inside was a spiral notebook with a cartoon fox on the cover. Clare had bought it three weeks before she died.
He took it to his study, shut the door, and read his daughter's handwriting for two hours.
She wrote about being sent to bed without dinner for talking at the table.
She wrote about giving her bread to Noah when he was crying, and about what happened when Rachel found out.
She wrote about the door at the end of the basement stairs, and about singing her mother's lullaby in the dark so she wouldn't be scared.
She wrote in November: Rachel says, "If I tell Daddy, they will take Noah away and it will be my fault." She says, "Daddy will believe a grown-up, not a kid." I think she is right.
And the last entry, dated four days earlier, was the one that broke him: If I am perfect, maybe Daddy will stay home. I just have to be smaller and quieter and better.