Maybe you’re seeing what you’re afraid of.

You’re new here; you don’t know this family; a wrong report follows a person for years. And all of that was true, every word, and none of it changed what I had to do.

Because I have sat in enough staff-room conversations over the years, the ones that start with I always felt something was off about that home, to know exactly how a child falls through.

It is almost never one villain slamming a door.

It is a dozen careful adults each deciding, privately and reasonably, that it isn’t quite their place, that they don’t have quite enough, that someone else with more authority will surely act.

Every one of them is being sensible.