He stared at me. Not the picture. His eyes refused to turn that way again. When I first saw the photos, I had not been able to look away. I’d stared and stared at the last shot, the pleading eyes, her blond hair in a matted tumble, trying to make Lexie tell me a different story. She had not.

I pointed to her. “Trey. Look. Really look.”

Instead he snatched the picture up, only that one, on the end, and began tearing at it. “I told you what happened. And sure, I was pretty high. Lexie got me high, remember? But I didn’t rape anyone. I would never rape someone.” He paused before the word “rape,” both times, as if it were too ugly to be allowed into his mouth. Much less his history.

I made myself stay seated and calm. I made my gaze stay only loving. This was my husband, my best friend, the father of my children. And this was hard for him. It had to be.

“You can tear it up, but you can’t unsee it. I can’t either. That photo shows me a girl who wanted out. If the evening happened like you said, even if she started it, in that shot I see a girl who changed her mind.”

“If?” he almost yelled. His chest heaved with fury or some other tightly leashed emotion. “If it happened like I said?”

I didn’t stop, though. “Maybe you don’t remember this part. Maybe she only changed her mind when she saw the camera. I could believe that. But you have to see. Even if you don’t remember it that way, even if you thought it was all fine the next morning, and every morning, up until this minute. That’s fine. I can believe that. But you have to see now. You have to face it. You have to fix it.”

“I cannot fucking believe—” He choked on the words.

I kept talking, calm, relentless, loving. “There’s a way past this. For you and me, maybe even for Lexie. We won’t know until we find her. She may be a murderer, in this hip-deep with her mother. Or she may not have known the things her mother planned to do. We can’t control that. We can only choose what we do. You can only choose what you do. Please don’t be too afraid to look and admit and try to make it right. Think if it was Anna-Claire in that photo. Think if it was Peyton.”

Something broke inside him then. His face flushed so dark it nearly purpled. I rose, too, reaching for him, worried he would have a stroke. He jerked away from my hands. He bent and snatched up the other pictures, tearing into all those small, trapped Lexies as he spoke, his voice graveled with fury.

“That would never happen to my girls. That would never happen.”