Chapter 2 - WHY REX WAS WATCHING
Six weeks before the fire, Quincy had begun waking at 2:17 every morning.
He never screamed. He simply appeared beside my bed, pale and silent, carrying Rex by one leg. When I asked what frightened him, he said he had forgotten. During breakfast he started hiding pieces of toast inside his pockets. At school he cried when his teacher closed the classroom door. The pediatrician found nothing physically wrong, but a child therapist named Dr. Priya Shah asked a question Everett and I had avoided.
“Did anything change in his routine before the fear began?”
Dorcas had started collecting him from school every Tuesday.
Everett’s company was negotiating a merger, and he was traveling constantly. I had returned to work part-time as an architectural drafter, so Dorcas offered to cover the two-hour gap between school dismissal and my arrival home. She presented it as generosity. Everett presented my reluctance as another example of how little I trusted his family.
The first time I asked Quincy what happened on Tuesdays, he stared at the kitchen doorway before answering. “Grandma asks practice questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Questions about whether you leave me alone. She says there are right answers and answers that make families disappear.”
Everett insisted his mother must be preparing Quincy for the school admissions interview. When I reminded him that no school interviewer would ask whether I left my son alone, he rubbed both hands over his face and said he could not survive another war between us.
That sentence became the architecture of our marriage. Dorcas could do whatever she wanted because challenging her exhausted Everett. My fear was treated as conflict; her control was treated as weather.
We already had a visible security camera in the living room because Quincy had suffered febrile seizures when he was younger. Anyone who cared for him signed a simple acknowledgment that the common areas could be monitored. Dorcas had signed it without reading, the way she signed restaurant receipts. Then the living-room camera began losing power every Tuesday afternoon.
The first week, Dorcas blamed the housekeeper. The second week, she said Quincy must have pulled the cable. By the third, I found a faint streak of her coral lipstick on the white plug.
I bought a small motion-activated camera that recorded locally and sewed it into Rex’s belly behind an existing repair. I hated doing it. I hated more that my son had begun asking whether telling me the truth would make his father stop loving him.
I did not place the camera in a bathroom, bedroom, or private space. Rex remained in the living room during Dorcas’s visits, and the monitoring consent she had signed covered that room. I told myself I needed only one ordinary Tuesday. If the footage showed nothing, I would remove the device and apologize to Everett for suspecting his mother.
The following Tuesday, Dorcas cancelled. The week after that, Everett took Quincy to Boston for a company family weekend. On the third week, I was delayed at work, and Dorcas stayed nearly four hours.
I had planned to review the recording after Quincy went to sleep.
Instead, Dorcas burned the dinosaur before dinner.
Everett carried Quincy upstairs while I placed the scorched camera and memory card inside a clean glass container. I photographed Rex on the hearth and called Tessa Ward, the family-law attorney I had quietly consulted after Dorcas’s second custody threat.
Tessa told me not to copy, edit, or play the card on our home devices. She arranged for a forensic examiner to preserve it the next morning. She also told me to take Quincy somewhere Dorcas could not enter.
“Is that really necessary?” Everett asked after I ended the call.
“Your mother threw his comfort toy into a fire and threatened to take him.”
“I know what she did.”
“Do you?” I asked. “Because Quincy believes you ordered it.”
He flinched. “I didn’t.”
“Then tell me what the papers are.”
Everett walked toward the window. For several seconds he watched Dorcas’s car disappear through the gates.
“My father created a trust before he died,” he said. “Quincy is named in it.”
“How much?”
“It isn’t about money.”
“How much, Everett?”
He finally faced me. “At the current valuation, his share is worth about sixty-eight million dollars.”
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Upstairs, Quincy began crying for the dinosaur Dorcas had burned.
The threat to take my son had never been only personal.
