He was in the front hallway when I arrived, freshly showered and wearing a raglan-sleeve hoodie that did wonders for his profile. He smelled like clean clothes and Dial soap and cinnamon chewing gum.

“Ash, hey!” he said, and gave me a hug. His keys jingled in his hand.

“Where you off to?” I asked.

“Football stuff,” he said.

“Not practice,” I said. “This late?”

“Nah,” he said. “It’s a meeting.”

“A meeting? Are you, like, selecting officers for your board?” I looked at him until he looked away, without answering.

I thought of Bobby, and all the other guilty-looking football boys.

“Have you guys heard anything about all that vandalism going on?” I asked.

He reddened. “No.”

“You’ve always been a bad liar, Connor,” I said. “It’s one of the things I love about you.”

At this, he chuckled. “But listen. For real. You need to let this go, Ash. Just so you know.”

“I won’t,” I said. “Just so you know.”

Connor reddened further. He looked at the floor for a while, and then he raised his eyes to meet mine. Still didn’t say anything. We eye-wrestled like that for a little while, but he did not stand down. So I turned and left.

“Have a good meeting.”

By the time I got to my house, I was so knotted up—with anger over the wave of vandalism, and with sadness over how Solomon was hurting—that I had looked up the number for Child Protective Services and was halfway through dialing it before I even realized what I was doing.

Here is a shortened, cleaned-up version of the internal argument that went on in my head for several minutes:

What the hell, Ash?

I have to do this. Solomon needs help. He won’t go get it willingly.

But is this the right way? And are you doing it for the right reason?

There is no right way. There are no simple answers. If I tell them about the brakeman’s hut where he sleeps sometimes, maybe they’ll send a social worker instead of calling the cops.

I finished dialing.

“Hi,” I said, when a woman answered. “I wanted to provide information about the location of an at-risk minor who was recently flagged with you for a wellness check?”

I felt better, when I hung up the phone. But it didn’t last long. The doubts came creeping in. And that stirred up that whole tangled nest of complicated emotions. Anger, that I had made the call—that I couldn’t go back in time and take it back. Fury, that the laws of physics had to be so fucking rigid. In a few minutes I felt cactus-prickly and itching for a fight. So I went downstairs and found my mother watching television, and launched right in.

“What do you know about what happened between Solomon’s mother and Connor’s father?”