Then say: we will come in at ten o’clock and he will tell you everything he knows, and I am going to make one phone call first.

Nobody will object.

I have since been told by the detective himself that he expected me to say it.

I had nine words and a doorway and thirteen years of being that boy’s mother, and what I said was: let me get him some trousers.

Part Fifty-Five: The Hallway, Slowly

They are sixteen now and they are at the same high school, which is a building from 2004 with lifts that work and no transition strips anywhere, because it was built after 1990 and therefore had to be.

Maya is in her third chair.