Evelyn told her story first, because Evelyn had clearly been ready to tell it for some time.

She sat in the armchair by the window with her hands folded, while Darius stood between the bed and the chair like a man guarding a door he had not chosen.

She said Nia had been strange all afternoon, snapping at nothing, slamming cupboards, talking to herself in the kitchen.

She said the babies had cried for an hour after their feed and Nia would not let anyone settle them.

She said that when she went into the nursery to take Lila somewhere quiet, Nia had come at her screaming, and in the struggle the girl had fallen against the crib and hurt her own face.

She said the wrist had happened the same way, wrenched in the fighting, all of it Nia’s own doing.

She said she had not called Darius at work because she would not shame the girl while there was still time to handle it inside the family.

Darius listened with his whole body.

Under her story, another sound ran, smaller and older: six weeks of his mother’s voice at his ear.

Nia sleeps while the babies cry, Darius.

Nia left Micah in a wet onesie again, Darius.

Nia snapped at me for touching a bottle, and a mother who snaps like that is not coping, Darius.

And under that, his own voice from that morning, standing in a kitchen that smelled of sour milk: this house is a disgrace, Nia, my mother does more in this kitchen than you do.

He had watched her turn away from him without a word.

He had taken his briefcase and gone to the bank and thought, all day, about how tired he was of everything.

Now his wife sat in their bed with one eye closing and would not accuse anybody of anything.

She fed Lila in silence while Evelyn talked.

She settled Micah against her shoulder and rocked him in small, exact movements, never once looking up.

When Evelyn had finished, she rose and said she would make tea, as if tea were a thing that could be introduced into this room.

The door closed behind her with a soft, deliberate click.

Darius carried warm water and a clean cloth from the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Let me clean it,” he said. “Please. Let me at least clean it.”

She let him.

She did not speak while he worked, and he worked the way he had seen nurses work, dabbing instead of wiping, holding the cloth to the cut on her cheek until it came away pink and then clean.

The forehead cut had sealed itself.

The eye would be black by morning.

He did Micah’s share of holding too, walking the carpet with his son against his chest until the boy’s breathing slowed, because his hands needed something to do that was not shaking.

“Tell me what you need,” he said at last, sitting down again. “Not what happened. Just tell me what you need.”

“Do not leave them with her.”

The words came out of her flat and fast, as if she had been holding them behind her teeth for hours.

“Darius. Whatever you believe. Do not leave my babies with her.”

Then he saw her wrist again, the clumsy gauze darkening where she had sweated through it.

“That wrap will not hold,” he said. “Let me redo it properly. You taught me how, remember? When I cut my hand on the fence last summer.”

She held the arm out to him without arguing, which frightened him more than the arguing would have.

He unwound the gauze slowly, layer by layer, and she turned her face away.

The wrist underneath was swollen to twice its size and hot to the touch.

And around it, standing out against her deep brown skin in a darker, angrier colour, were the marks of fingers.

Not one mark.

Four.

Four long bruises, curved in a row along the wrist, with a fifth, smaller, where a thumb had dug in on the other side.

Somebody had taken hold of that wrist and wrenched it, the way a person wrenches a stuck door.

Darius had taken anatomy in school like everybody else, and he knew what falling looked like, and he knew what a hand looked like.

He knew that a right hand cannot leave those marks on its own left wrist.

And he knew, with a clarity that emptied his whole chest, that the woman sitting in front of him could not have done this to herself if she had tried for a week.

His hands, holding hers, had stopped moving.

“Darius,” she said quietly.

“Say it,” he told her. “Whatever it is. Say it in this room.”