One day my little daughter told me, ‘Mom, every time Grandpa gives me a bath, he asks me to play a game. I have to close my eyes, and while they’re closed, he does something…’ I froze. The next day, I opened the bathroom door without warning… and what I saw made my legs start shaking 
My daughter, Emily, was six years old when she first said the sentence that kept me awake almost the entire night.
That afternoon, we were in the kitchen. I was making dinner while she sat at the table drawing.
Then, without even looking up, she said,
“Mom, did you know Grandpa and I have a game?”
I smiled.
My father, George, was seventy-six years old, and he and Emily were almost inseparable.
He picked her up from school, read her stories, and taught her how to plant flowers in the garden.
“What kind of
Emily thought for a moment.
“When Grandpa gives me a bath, he tells me to close my eyes.”
The knife in my hand stopped. I turned toward her.
“Why?”
She shrugged.
“So we can play.”
Okay?”
She looked at me, confused.
“But Grandpa doesn’t do anything bad.”
That sentence should have reassured me. It didn’t. That night, I barely slept.
My father had always been the person I trusted most. Whenever my husband had to work late, Dad came over to help me.
Whenever Emily was sick, he could sit beside her for hours.
I had never seen anything that made me suspicious of him. But now my mind had taken one sentence and built a hundred
frightening possibilities around it.
The next morning, I started remembering little things that had never seemed important before. A few weeks earlier, Dad
had told me,
“You’re busy. I’ll getEmily
Another time, the bathroom door had been closed. When I knocked, I heard both of them laughing. Back then, I had smiled.
Now the same memory felt completely different. All day, I kept telling
myself I was overreacting. But something in me
refused to let it go.
The next evening, Dad came over again. After dinner, Emily ran up to him.
“Grandpa, are we going to play our game today?”
I looked at my father. He smiled.
“If your mom doesn’t mind.”
“Of course,” I said.
But I had already made up my mind. Ten minutes later, I heard the water running.
Then Emily laughing. I slowly walked toward the bathroom. The door was closed, but not locked. I stepped close enough to
hear them. Dad said,
Emily
was sitting safely in the tub, surrounded by bubbles and bath toys.
Her eyes were closed.
My father was holding a small cup in one hand, using it to rinse her hair, while in the other hand he held one of Emily’s rubber ducks.
“Mom,” Emily laughed, “you ruined the game!”
I looked at them, confused.
“What game?”
Dad slowly smiled.
“Guess the sound.”
It turned out that a few months earlier, Emily had started being afraid of having her hair washed because shampoo had once gotten into her eyes.
Every bath had become stressful.
My father didn’t want that fear to get worse.
So he invented a game.
Emily would close her eyes, and Dad would make sounds using different bath toys—the rubber duck, a little cup, a water bottle.
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