Caden

I hadn't thought about Greta having a life outside our nursery until Detective Boyle said his name, and once she did, I couldn't stop thinking about a boy I'd only met twice, both times waiting in an old sedan in our driveway with his headphones on, not quite meeting my eyes when I waved.

Caden was sixteen, Boyle told us later, quiet at school, decent grades, no record of his own, and had been picked up for questioning alongside his mother purely as a formality, expected to say nothing useful and go home within the hour.

He didn't say nothing.

He didn't say much either, not that first day — mostly silence, mostly staring at the table, according to the officer who sat in — but partway through, when they asked if he'd ever seen his mother frustrated with a child she cared for, something in his face changed, and he asked, very quietly, whether anything he said could get his mom arrested tonight, because if it could, he needed to know first what would happen to him and where he'd live.

That question told the officers more than any answer could have.

They didn't push him that day. They gave him a card, told him he could call anytime, and sent him home with his mother, because there was nothing yet that let them do otherwise.

I thought about that car ride home for days afterward — a boy who'd just been asked, carefully, whether his mother hurt children, driving home afterward in the passenger seat next to the person the question was about, with nowhere else to go and no one else to tell.