Christmas morning is supposed to feel warm and familiar. The kind of morning where time slows down, coffee goes cold on the table, and you memorize the sound of your child’s laughter because you want to keep it forever.
That was what I expected.
I’m Julia. I had been married to my husband, Mike, for six years. We had one child together, our five-year-old son, Simon. From the outside, our life looked steady. Predictable. Safe.
We weren’t perfect, but nothing ever felt truly alarming.
Looking back, that’s what scares me most.
There were signs. Small ones. The kind you dismiss because life is busy and marriage is complicated. Mike sometimes seemed distracted, emotionally somewhere else. He worked long hours. I told myself stress explained everything.
I should have listened more closely to the quiet discomfort I kept pushing aside.
Especially after what I now think of as the babysitter situation earlier that year.
We had been feeling distant, so we tried to fix it the way responsible adults do. We scheduled weekly date nights. One of Mike’s coworkers recommended a babysitter, a college-aged woman named Megan. At first, everything seemed fine.
Simon liked her.
