It hurts too much.” I did not ask her anything more in that moment — you learn not to interrogate a frightened six-year-old in front of her whole class.

But that one sentence would not leave me.

Chapter 3 — The Long Night

It followed me to my car.

It sat in the passenger seat the whole drive home through the sluggish commuter traffic.

It went cold with my coffee at the kitchen table, and it followed me into bed, where every siren out on the avenue snapped my eyes back open.

By three in the morning, staring at the ceiling, one thing had settled into my bones and would not be argued with: if I let this get buried — if I looked away to protect my job and my quiet life — I would never be able to look at myself again.

I have taught long enough to know what the signs are, and I have also taught long enough to know that a teacher who is sure and a teacher who is right are not always the same person.

But I also knew the rule I’d taken an oath to follow.

I am a mandated reporter.

The law does not ask me to be certain.

It asks me to raise my hand when a child shows me what Birdie had shown me, and let the people trained to investigate do the rest.

I lay there and argued with myself the way you do at that hour, when every fear is louder than it will be by daylight.

There was a voice — I recognize it now as the voice of self-preservation wearing the mask of reason — that kept offering me exits. Maybe it really was a fall.