“I believed it would be a few days.” She turned the folder around. “Margaret, I want to be honest with you. I made a judgment call in your living room and it was the right one and I would make it again, and it was also outside about four things it should have been inside of.

My supervisor has been extremely decent about it. There’s a corrective action plan with my name on it.”

I looked at the paperwork.

“Am I in trouble?”

“No. You’re a footnote.” She almost laughed. “That’s the thing nobody tells you. The child was fine, the mother came back, the man’s in custody, everybody’s alive — and there’s still a form, because the form doesn’t care how it turned out.

It cares what we knew at nine in the morning.”