Shelley scans the crowd as she makes her way to the car. Once again, she will be late picking Harvey up, so she takes a deep breath and calls the teacher to let him know and to hear what it is Harvey has done now. She gets his machine and, against her better judgment, leaves a message. She hates for her voice to be trapped there in someone’s machine, waiting to be let out, but if she hung up, that would be worse, because he would know it was her. “I’m on my way,” she says. “I’m so sorry I’m late.”

She barely starts the car, and he calls right back, more interested it seems in the trial verdict than anything; everyone in town is. The word guilty feels good on her tongue, and she relishes being the one who has something important to tell instead of just being told.

“So about our boy, Harvey.”

“Yes,” she says, marveling for a second at the surge in her chest with the use of that plural pronoun—our, our boy. She always loved when she heard Brent say that: “Our son,” “our boy.” And then she would add the s to the end of it: Our sons, our boys.

“I’m almost there,” she says, and then, without meaning to, drives slower and slower, tired and slow like when Harvey pretends to be a turtle, scooching along and laughing as he inches his way across the floor.

When she pulls up and parks, Harvey is over on the swings with another child, pumping his legs and soaring as high as possible, a bushy handlebar mustache lopsided on his face and obscuring his grin each time he flies upward. Ned Stone is waiting for her there on the curb. “Another kid has a late pickup, too,” he says, “so let’s just sit right here.” He motions to a bench in front of the school, and they sit.

“Look,” he begins. “Harvey is a really sweet kid, and I hope you won’t take this wrong.”

“That’s always a bad sign,” she says.

“What I mean is that I feel I might be speaking out of turn, and yet I think Harvey’s acting out might have a lot to do with what’s going on at home.”

He waits for her to look up and into his face, which is hard to do, his green eyes unblinking like a cat’s.

“Look, I don’t want to intrude, but is his father coming back? Do you know?”

“What?” She watches Harvey swinging higher and higher.