“And what did you say to Bobby?” I asked.

Matty rubbed the hem of his shirt between his fingers.

“I told him you have a box in your closet with shiny medals in it.”

I looked at the red ink stamped across his paper, with the sharp dark lines of Wyler’s initials scrawled beside the date.

The lieutenant wasn’t just ticking boxes on a school roster.

He was putting up a wall between an eleven-year-old boy and his mother’s twenty years of service.

“I’ll be in that gym on Friday at eleven-thirty,” I said.