They were kissing.”

There were a hundred more questions rising in me, and I stopped every one of them at my teeth, because I understood, even in that first terrible minute, the most important thing about the situation I was in: my son was a child, not a witness.

He was not a source to be interrogated.

Whatever I needed to know, I would find another way to learn it, because the one thing I would not do — the one thing I would rather have died than do — was turn my frightened five-year-old into an informant, and teach him that telling me the truth had opened a new interrogation.

He had been used enough.