I told him the story carefully, watching his face the entire time. “Caleb pointed at a woman by the bakery and said she comes to our house when I’m at work.” I laughed lightly, as if it were nothing, as if a child’s imagination were the funniest thing in the world. “Kids, right? He said she plays in our bedroom.” I felt Preston’s arms stiffen around me for just a fraction of a second. His smile held, but something behind his eyes flickered, a quick, involuntary calculation. “That’s hilarious,” he said, a beat too late. “He’s got quite an imagination.”

I nodded and went to start dinner, my hands perfectly steady even as my heart pounded. Because I had learned two things that afternoon. The first was that the woman wearing my necklace had reacted with genuine confusion, not the guilt of a mistress caught in the open. The second was the way Preston’s jaw had tightened when I mentioned the bedroom. Something was wrong in my house, but it was not the simple affair my son’s words had first suggested. That night, after Preston fell asleep, I quietly took my phone into the bathroom and opened the security app connected to the small camera we’d installed in the hallway “for the babysitter.” I scrolled back three weeks. And what I saw on that footage made my blood run cold in a way no bakery ever could.