Judge Halloway leaned so far over the bench I thought he might come off it.
“Bring it here, please,” he said quietly, and a bailiff carried the shirt up, and the judge read the inside of it in a silence so complete I could hear the vents in the ceiling.
Each entry was a date, and beside each date, in a child’s plain words, was a thing that had been done to him.
The last one had been written the day of the photograph.
I could not read it from where I sat, but I watched the judge read it, and I watched his face change — watched something go hard and cold behind his eyes, the particular anger of a decent man discovering exactly how a child has been used.
Chapter 7 — The Notes
I learned later, in pieces, what my son had been carrying alone.
For three months, Lyle had been finding Rory — outside the school, at the edge of the park, in the small unguarded gaps of a shared-custody arrangement — and using those minutes to do the quiet work of turning a boy against his own home.
He would offer things.
He would ask Rory to make small troubles for me, and he would frame each one as a game, or a secret, or a kindness.