My sister, Liz, had never trusted Karen with Owen — not since the first time she'd babysat and Liz noticed the nursery cloud footage had gaps in it, hours at a time with no video saved. So two weeks earlier, without telling me, she'd started downloading a backup copy every time she visited, just in case.
She pulled it up on her phone with hands that weren't quite steady either.
The first clip was from three nights before, timestamped 9:14 p.m. — a night Jason had told me he was working late. It was Karen, alone in the nursery, and Jason's voice coming through on speakerphone.
"You need to let me handle her the way I handled you when you were a baby," Karen was saying. "Soft parents raise soft kids."
And then Jason's voice, tired, resigned, but unmistakably his.
"Fine. Just don't leave marks this time, Mom."
This time.
I must have made a sound, because Jason's face had gone the color of old paper.
"Hannah, that's not — I meant marks from the crib rail, he'd been chewing on it, I wasn't talking about—"
"Don't," I said, and it came out exactly the way it had come out at Karen twenty minutes earlier. "Don't you dare finish that sentence like it makes it better."
Liz kept scrolling. There was a second clip, older, from a visit six weeks ago — Karen again, this time complaining to Jason's sister on a call about how "soft" the parenting had gotten in this family, and mentioning, almost offhand, that Jason himself had a scar on his hairline from when he was two that "nobody talks about anymore."
Jason wasn't looking at either of us now. He was staring at the carpet where Owen had landed an hour earlier, and for the first time since he'd walked through the door, something like understanding was breaking across his face — not about what his mother had done to our son.
About what had apparently been done to him.