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daughter before she goes to bed.”
    “I’m not saying another word until I talk to her,” I bargained. “Give me that number, and I’ll tell you what really happened today.”
    He stared at me for a minute—I knew that technique, too. When you have been doing this as long as I have, you can ferret out truth by reading someone’s eyes. I wonder what he saw in mine. Disappointment,
maybe. Here I was, a police officer, and I hadn’t even been able to keep you safe.
    The detective picked up the phone and dialed. He asked for your room and talked quietly to a nurse who answered. Then he handed the receiver to me. “You have one minute,” he said.
    You were groggy, shaken awake by that nurse. Your voice sounded small enough for me to carry around in my back pocket. “Willow,” I said. “It’s Daddy.”
    “Where are you? Where’s Mommy?”
    “We’re coming back for you, honey. We’re going to see you tomorrow, first thing.” I didn’t know that this was true, but I wasn’t going to let you think we’d abandoned you. “One to ten?” I asked.
    It was a game we played whenever there was a break—I offered you a pain scale, you showed me how brave you were. “Zero,” you whispered, and it felt like a punch.
    Here’s something you should know about me: I don’t cry. I haven’t cried since my father passed away, when I was ten. I’ve come close, let me tell you. Like when you were born, and almost died right afterward. Or when I saw the look on your face when, as a two-year-old, you had to learn how to walk again after being casted for five months with a hip fracture. Or today, when I saw Amelia being pulled away. It’s not that I don’t feel like breaking down—it’s that someone’s got to be the strong one, so that you all don’t have to be.
    So I pulled it together and cleared my throat. “Tell me something I don’t know, baby.”
    It was another game between us: I’d come home, and you’d recite something you’d learned that day—honestly, I’d never seen a kid absorb information like you. Your body might betray you at every turn, but your brain picked up the slack.
    “A nurse told me that a giraffe’s heart weighs twenty-five pounds,” you said.
    “That’s huge,” I replied. How heavy was my own? “Now, Wills, I want you to lie down and get a good night’s rest, so that you’re wide awake when I come get you in the morning.”
    “You promise?”
    I swallowed. “You bet, baby. Sleep tight, okay?” I handed the phone back to the detective.
    “How touching,” he said flatly, hanging it up. “All right, I’m listening.”
    I rested my elbows on the table between us. “We had just gotten into the park, and there was an ice-cream place close to the entry. Willow was hungry, so we decided we’d stop off there. My wife went to get napkins, Amelia sat down at a table, and Willow and I were waiting in line. Her sister saw something through the window, and Willow ran to go look at it, and she fell down and broke her femurs. She’s got a disease called osteogenesis imperfecta, which means her bones are extremely brittle. One in ten thousand kids are born with it. What the fuck else do you want to know?”
    “That’s exactly the statement you gave an hour ago.” The detective threw down his pen. “I thought you were going to tell me what happened.”
    “I did. I just didn’t tell you what you wanted to hear.”
    The detective stood up. “Sean O’Keefe,” he said. “You’re under arrest.”
     
    By seven on Sunday morning, I was pacing in the waiting room of the police station, a free man, waiting for Charlotte to be released. The desk sergeant who let me out of the lockup shuffled beside me, uncomfortable. “I’m sure you understand,” he said. “Given the circumstances, we were only doing our job.”
    My jaw tightened. “Where’s my older daughter?”
    “DCF is on their way here with her.”
    I had been told—professional courtesy—that Louie, the dispatcher at