It is what a district does so that an investigation can happen without the subject in the building, and it is paid, and my health insurance did not stop, and Silas’s did not either.

It felt like the end of my life.

I handed over my keys and I went down the corridor to the woodshop at ten past nine in the morning and packed my own hand tools out of the locked cabinet — my chisels, the brass marking gauge, my grandfather’s cherrywood try square — into a canvas bag, and David Pulaski stood in the doorway and did not say anything useful and did not need to.

Twenty-three school days.