Victoria stared at him. The tears were tracking down her face now without stopping. The full confrontation had pulled every remaining piece of the secret into the kitchen at once—the love, the ownership, the refusal to stop, the real-time claim, the continuous pressure, the heavy silence—and there was no ordinary table left to set them on and no continuous calm left to hold them.

“You are standing in my kitchen,” she said, voice broken and shaking and completely finished with every softer version of the reckoning, “telling me the practical future is that you will keep fucking my daughter and leaving marks on her body and filling her while I...