They did not think much about it beyond that, because they did not have to; the cold was a thing happening on the other side of their windows, to be watched and not felt.

That is what cold is, for people who have somewhere warm to be.

It is weather.

It is scenery.

But for a nine-year-old boy, soaked to the skin, without a coat, locked outside and alone, those same conditions were not scenery.

They were lethal.

I am a physician; I know exactly what that kind of cold does to a small body, how fast it does it, how a child that size loses heat, how the hypothermia comes on.

I know the timeline of it the way I know my own name.