The first night after Karen’s phone call, Kassie didn’t sleep. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling while Emma slept peacefully in her crib, the baby monitor crackling with the soft sounds of innocent dreams. Every few minutes, Kassie would replay fragments of the conversation—Daniel’s voice in the background begging Karen for forgiveness, calling Kassie “nothing,” his desperate promises that he’d never see her again.
The smoke alarm in the kitchen had finally stopped beeping around midnight, after she’d opened all the windows to clear out the smell of her burned dinner. Such a small thing—ruined pasta sauce—but it felt symbolic of everything else Daniel had destroyed with his lies.
By morning, the shock had crystallized into something sharper: the complete understanding of how thorough
