I set up the camera to check on my baby during naptime, but what I heard shattered me first: my mother snarling, “You live off my son and still dare to say you’re tired?” Then, right beside my child’s crib, she grabbed my wife by the hair.

My mother’s hands froze over the baby blanket. Lily closed her eyes.

“What camera?” my mother asked, though she clearly knew.

“The nursery feed.”

I watched the color shift in her face—not guilt, but irritation that she had been caught without time to prepare. “So now I’m being recorded in my own grandson’s room?”

“You pulled Lily’s hair.”

My mother laughed thinly. “Oh, for God’s sake. I moved her aside. She was in the way.”

Lily flinched the way people do when a lie is too familiar.

I turned to her gently. “Tell me the truth.”

She began crying before she answered. Not loudly. Lily never cried loudly anymore. It was the quiet kind—the kind that looked apologetic even while it broke your heart.

“She’s been doing it for weeks,” she whispered.

The sentence hollowed me out.