I didn't ask Nathan anything else that night.
I carried Grace back up to her room, sat with her until she stopped shaking, and left the hallway light on. Then I went into the bathroom, locked the door, and called the emergency line for the county caseworker who'd handled Grace's placement.
It took her a while to call back — it was almost midnight by then — but when she did, she confirmed the one thing I'd been hoping I was wrong about.
Grace's emergency placement, eight months before we adopted her, had been at a private foster arrangement run by a man named Curtis — Nathan's brother. Two prior complaints had been filed against that placement in the years before Grace arrived there. Both were closed for lack of evidence when the children involved, too young and too frightened, weren't able to give consistent statements. The county had quietly stopped placing kids there after the second complaint, but the file had never been flagged in a way that would have shown up in a standard background check on a relative wanting to adopt.
"Did you know a Nathan visited the house regularly during that placement?" I asked her.
There was a pause on the other end that told me everything before she said a word.
"I'll need to reopen the file," she said. "Don't let him be alone with her. Not for a minute, not for an hour. I'll have someone out first thing tomorrow."
I hung up and went back to Grace's room. I didn't sleep in the guest room that night. I moved a chair in front of her door and sat there until the sun came up, and when Nathan knocked quietly around 6 a.m. and asked to talk, I told him through the door that he could talk to the caseworker in the morning, not to me, and not to Grace.
"I only ever visited my brother," he said, low, urgent, like he needed me to believe it before I had the chance not to. "I never — Olivia, I never touched her."
I didn't answer him. I was watching Grace instead, awake now, sitting up in bed with her knees pulled to her chest, watching the door the way she'd watched the belt buckle the morning before.
She hadn't said his name was innocent. She'd said he was there too.