Whose Side

Weston didn't ask what happened. That was the first wrong note, if I'd been listening for wrong notes, which I wasn't yet — I was still holding Jasper, still shaking.

"You hit my mother," he said. Not a question.

"She had him by one arm, Weston. Yanked him out of the crib like a sack. There's a mark on him—"

"He's fine." He didn't look at the baby. He looked at his mother, at the red mark still visible on her cheek, and something in his face went soft with sympathy that should have been mine.

"Look at his arm," I said. "Look at him, not her."

He looked. For half a second, I watched something flicker — recognition, maybe, or fear — before he smoothed it over. "Babies bruise easy. It's nothing."

"It's not nothing. I watched her do it."

"You slapped my seventy-one-year-old mother in her own — in my house." His voice cracked upward on house, like he'd almost said something else and caught it.

Doreen, to her credit, had the decency to look away when he said that, out toward the window, like she suddenly found the driveway fascinating.

"Weston. Listen to yourself."

"I am listening to myself. I'm listening to my wife accuse my mother of hurting a baby she's held a hundred times."

"Then explain the mark."

"Kids bruise. That's what kids do." He said it too fast, too rehearsed, the way you say a sentence you've said before about a different kid, in a different year.

I didn't catch that then. I was too busy being furious, too busy holding my son and hating both of them a little. I put Jasper in his swing and went to run bottles under hot water because my hands needed something to do that wasn't shaking.

It wasn't until I was back in the kitchen, alone, phone buzzing with a notification I almost ignored, that I remembered the monitor app syncs footage automatically — clips it saves whenever it hears raised voices.

There was a clip from forty minutes before I walked into that nursery.

I don't know why I opened it. I wish, some nights, that I hadn't.