Nine months later, I finally asked her what she’d apologized for. She was quiet for a long time, then asked whether I was angry with her. I told her I wasn’t. She said the dispatcher had asked whether she was calling because someone had hurt her, and she had said no. Then the dispatcher asked whether someone at home was hurting someone else. My daughter had apologized again because she thought she’d gotten her father in trouble. She had been trying to protect him, even while asking the police to come. Then she finally told me what had happened that Tuesday afternoon.
She said she’d been doing homework in her room when she heard my husband on the phone. He was angry, but she couldn’t hear the other person’s side. She said he kept repeating, “You can’t tell her. She’ll make everything worse.” Then there was a loud noise downstairs. My daughter came out and saw him standing beside the kitchen table with something broken on the floor. She said he looked at her and immediately became calm, told her everything was fine, and asked her to go back upstairs. She did. But she’d already noticed something that bothered her: my name was written on the piece of paper he’d been holding.
The paper was a letter I’d never seen. My daughter had taken a photograph of it with an old tablet because she was afraid she’d forget what she’d seen. When she finally showed me, I recognized the handwriting immediately. It was from my husband’s employer, dated three weeks earlier, warning him that an investigation had started into missing money. My husband had apparently been trying to hide it from me because my name was connected to the account. I asked my daughter why she had waited nine months to tell me. She looked at me and said, “Because Dad told me you would leave him if you knew.” Then she handed me the tablet again. There was one more photograph she’d never shown anyone.
