“Beckett, that’s an entirely different situation. Jake isn’t your father. Your father wasn’t cheating. And you don’t know that Jake was either, do you?”

“I can’t prove it, but—”

“Stop.” Her hand settles over mine on the counter, and she squeezes. “Again, for the record, this is a completely different situation than what happened with your father. But if you’re going to take my advice and apply it in ways I never intended, then take this next piece of advice with it, because it’s just as important. The worst thing you can do in an investigation is to start off with a presumption of guilt. A detective investigates to find the truth, not to prove what she thinks she already knows. If you’re looking for evidence that Jake cheated, eventually you’re going to find something that looks like proof, whether or not it is proof.”

“So … what should I do?”

“You should decide whether or not you trust him, because that’s what really matters. If you trust him, you have to believe him. If you don’t, then it doesn’t matter whether or not he lied—whether or not he cheated—because you can’t be with someone you can’t trust. And—”

“But you stayed with Dad, and you couldn’t trust him.”

We couldn’t trust him.

At first, it was little things. Like text messages he didn’t want us to see. So he stopped leaving his phone sitting around. Then the fire station let him go, and we didn’t know about that for three days, and once we finally did find out—my mother figures everything out, eventually—he lied about how he lost his job. He said a couple of the other guys had it in for him. That they were telling lies about him to the chief. Dad said those guys were jealous because he was a better fireman, and that he didn’t want that job anyway if they were willing to believe those assholes over him.

He said there were lots of other jobs out there for a man with a decade of active duty service and several more years in the reserves. He said offers would start rolling in. He said we would be fine. But those offers never came, and with our household income cut in half, it didn’t take long for us to go through our savings. For my mother to start paying for groceries on a credit card. For her to downgrade our internet speed and cancel the cable. To start buying us Walmart-brand sodas, jeans, and shoes.

We weren’t supposed to notice any of that. And maybe Landry didn’t. She was only in the seventh grade. But Penn and I aren’t kids. We understood what was going on.

At least, I thought I did.