I called Rosa's cell phone directly, and she answered within two rings, her voice carrying immediate, visible relief at hearing my voice.
"Mr. David, thank God you're home," she said, before I'd even fully explained why I was calling. "I've been so worried about Mrs. Claire. Mrs. Margaret told me to take the week off, but I didn't want to leave, not with everything that's been happening."
"Rosa, I need you to tell me everything," I said. "Everything you've observed over these past months, not just recently."
What Rosa described, over the following twenty minutes, painted a picture considerably more disturbing than even Claire's account had suggested — a sustained, escalating pattern of humiliation and control that had apparently begun almost immediately after our wedding two years earlier, growing more severe with each passing month, particularly once Claire's pregnancy had become visible and, according to Rosa's careful observation, my mother's controlling behavior had intensified alongside it.