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My Husband Took One Look at Our Baby's Legs and Started Photographing Them Like Evidence Dev found the marks at six on a Saturday morning, during a diaper change, and the first thing he did was reach for his phone. I heard the camera shutter from the kitchen. Click, click, click. Then his voice, very low. "Joanna. Come here. Don't wake Anya." Ravi was fifteen months old, lying on the changing table kicking his socks. Across his thighs and bottom were round sores, a dozen of them. Some were small blisters. Others had burst and crusted over with a honey-colored scab. Each one was about the size of a pencil eraser. "What are those?" I said. "You tell me." "I don't know. He had a rash on Tuesday. I put cream on it." "Those are cigarette burns." His voice cracked on the last word. "Jo, those are cigarette burns." I want you to understand what that word meant to him. Dev has a small round scar on the inside of his left forearm. His father put a cigarette out there when Dev was five. He told me about it once, in the dark, two years into our marriage. He has never said it out loud since. He quit smoking the week we found out I was pregnant with Anya, and he can't stand the smell on a stranger's jacket. "They're not burns," I said. "He's never been near a cigarette." "Somebody did this." "Dev, nobody..." "Who's been around him?" He had stopped photographing. His hand was shaking. "Your brother? Your mom's boyfriend, Gary? Does Gary smoke?" "Gary hasn't watched him alone in his life." "Who has?" "Me! Daycare. You." He looked at me. It lasted maybe two seconds. I've gone back over those two seconds more than any others. "You've been exhausted for a month," he said. "You said you were at the end of your rope." "I said I was tired of the night wakings." "Joanna." His eyes were wet. "If something happened, if you lost your temper one time, I need you to tell me. I won't be angry. I swear on my life I won't be." He said it like a gift. He was offering to forgive me for something I'd never done. "I didn't touch him," I whispered. "I'd cut off my hand first." "Then who?" "I don't know! Let's just go to the doctor. Please." "Mommy?" Anya was standing in the doorway in her sleep shirt, hair flattened on one side. She's eight. She likes mysteries and keeps a notebook where she records "clues" about everything, from missing socks to why the neighbor's dog barks at noon. She'd been there long enough to hear the whole thing. "Daddy said cigarette," she said slowly. "Somebody put cigarettes on Ravi?" "Anya, honey, go back to bed." "Aunt Priscilla said once that when a baby gets hurt, it's always the person who's home all day." She looked at me. "You're home all day, Mommy." I felt the floor go out from under me. "Anya..." "Did you?" she asked. It wasn't cruel. She asked it the way she asks everything, because she wanted the answer. "I'll keep your secret. I won't write it in my notebook." I'd have taken any other blow. I knelt in front of her. "I did not hurt your brother. I promise on everything." She nodded slowly. But she took a step back, then another. Dev still held the phone in his hand with the camera screen glowing, showing a close-up of Ravi's leg. Anya looked at it, then at her father. "Are you going to call the police?" she asked. He didn't answer. He only stood there, ashen, and I understood that he already had. By noon, the police had left, and a social worker named Ms. Cortez had been to our house. She was gentle and unhurried. She photographed Ravi's legs, asked who lived in the home, asked whether anyone smoked, and asked how I'd been coping. I said "fine" in a voice I didn't recognize. Dev's mother arrived at one. Lorraine is seventy, small and sharp-eyed, a retired school secretary who has never once forgotten a name. She looked at Ravi's legs for a long time, then turned to me.