I thought losing my baby daughter would be the hardest thing I would ever survive. I was wrong. Two weeks after Claudia died during childbirth, my eight-year-old son, Willie, started behaving strangely. Every day, he put coins and crumpled bills into an old glass jar. When I finally asked why, he told me he was saving enough money to bring his baby sister home. I tried explaining that Claudia was gone, but Willie refused to believe me. Then one afternoon, while adding his lunch money, he looked at me with tears in his eyes. “Mom, she’s not gone.” My heart stopped. I asked him what he meant. He stared toward the bedroom door, where his father was downstairs. Then he whispered something that made my entire body go cold. “Daddy used money.”

I asked Willie to explain. He told me that while I was recovering in the hospital, he had seen his father near the elevators talking to a woman. Robert had handed her a thick envelope. Willie said the woman opened it, took the money, and then picked up a crying baby. Robert had touched the baby’s head before she left. I struggled to believe him. Then Willie gave me the detail I couldn’t dismiss. The woman was Claire, Robert’s younger sister. Her daughter, Ivy, had been born only weeks before Claudia. Claire had visited me after Claudia’s death, but I had never questioned why she seemed uncomfortable around me. Now I suddenly wondered whether my husband had been hiding something far more painful than grief. I went downstairs, found Robert at the kitchen sink, and demanded the truth.