I stepped out of the doorway and directly into Arthur’s space, close enough that he had to look at me.

“Teach him,” I repeated.

“By locking a nine-year-old child out of the house, with no coat, in seven-degree weather, in a freezing rainstorm.

That was your lesson.”

“I expected him to stay on the covered porch,” Arthur said, and there was a defensive edge creeping into his voice now, the first hairline crack of a man beginning to grasp the size of what he had done.

“I never told him to leave the property.” Officer Torres glanced down at her notes.