“I didn’t walk in at the wrong moment,” he said. “I was standing by the gate.”
Corinne’s face went still.
Ethan continued before she could answer. “I heard what you said to her. I watched you stop the bicycle. I watched you put your hand on her shoulder, and I watched you push her onto the ground. So I want you to be very careful about what you say next, because my daughter is listening, and she has already heard enough lies for one afternoon.”
Corinne glanced at Maisie, then back at him, and for the first time her composure cracked. “Ethan, I did not push her the way you’re making it sound. I touched her shoulder because she was being defiant, and the bicycle moved. If I used more force than I intended, then I’m sorry, but you cannot seriously believe I meant to hurt a four-year-old child.”
“You told that four-year-old child her father wasn’t here to protect her.”
“She was being dramatic.”
The words came too quickly. Corinne seemed to realize it immediately, but Ethan had already felt Maisie flinch against him. He rested one hand across the back of his daughter’s head, shielding her face against his shoulder as his anger settled into something colder and more deliberate.
“She wasn’t being dramatic,” he said. “She was afraid of you.”
Corinne drew a breath and lowered her voice, apparently deciding that reason would serve her better than denial. “Ethan, you have been working constantly for months, and I have been the one managing the difficult parts of raising her. She has tantrums when you leave, she refuses instructions, and she knows that the moment you come home, all she has to do is cry and you will assume someone has mistreated her. I have tried to be patient because I know what she has been through, but being her stepmother does not mean I have to accept being treated as though I have no authority in my own home.”
Ethan listened, and the longer she spoke, the more unsettling her argument became. She was not talking about what had happened in the courtyard anymore; she was building a case against a child who still needed help fastening the buttons on her pajamas. Maisie had stopped sobbing loudly, yet her breathing remained shallow, and when Ethan looked down he saw that she was gripping a fold of his shirt so tightly her knuckles had gone pale.
He turned back to Corinne. “Go upstairs and pack a bag.”
For a moment she appeared not to understand him. “What?”
“I said pack a bag. Take whatever you need for the next few days and leave.”
Corinne stared at him with open disbelief, and when she spoke again the careful softness was gone. “You’re throwing your wife out of the house because a child fell off a bicycle?”
Ethan adjusted Maisie against him and stepped past the overturned bike, putting himself fully between his wife and daughter. “I’m telling you to leave because I watched you hurt my child, and when you realized I’d seen you, your first instinct was to lie to my face. I don’t know how long you’ve been speaking to her that way when I’m not around, and right now I don’t trust myself to guess.”
“You are going to destroy our marriage over one moment that you deliberately misunderstood.”