“Where is he?”
The woman pulled the little boy gently behind her. “At work. Lumber yard, about thirty minutes from here.”
“His name is Daniel.”
The woman’s eyes filled. “His name is Danny.”
“No,” Margaret said. “It isn’t.”
The little boy peered around from behind his mother’s leg. He had something in his face that Margaret could not look at directly — something specific and painful that she recognized, that she had last seen in a school photograph on her own nightstand.
The woman said, “My name is Kate.”
“I know you didn’t do this,” Margaret said, because she could
see from the way Kate was holding herself — the way a person holds themselves when they have been carrying knowledge that they know doesn’t belong to them — that this was true. “Tell me what you know.”
Kate sat her at the kitchen table. There were crayons on the surface. A lunch box. A half-finished spelling worksheet with a child’s name at the top.
