And I said, “Not tonight, buddy.

Everything’s okay.”

I have gone over that exchange for eighteen years and I still cannot tell you whether it was a nine-year-old asking whether the police would return, or a nine-year-old asking whether there was any point in him saying anything.

I never found out what happened in that apartment.

I looked, once, about four years later, and there was nothing in the system, which means either nothing happened or nothing was ever reported, and those two look identical from a database.

What I know is that a child spoke to me in a doorway and I gave him a comfortable answer and left, and that I did not write down a word of it.