Ciarra was pacing up and down. The social worker thought about asking her about her work, but seeing as how she already knew the answer and knew that Ciarra would lie, she didn’t bother. “Ma’am, because of the hour right now, I’ll be taking Aston to the office. We are going to do Aston’s physical tomorrow morning. Unless for some reason the physical goes on all day long, which it shouldn’t, I’m going to pick him up from there and drop him off at school. Within five days, you can request a visit with him and we can have someone supervise that visit. During that visit, we are gonna need you to do a urine test just to make sure that there are no drugs in your system. I can update you any time if you want to call me. Do you have any questions before we take him with us?”

Ciarra’s rage took over her terror again. “I don’t appreciate these fucking allegations. How the fuck would you feel if someone just came into your house in the middle of the day and took your kid away? How the fuck would you feel? Yeah, I feel pretty shitty, obviously.”

Mike walked over to the purple van and put Aston’s toy cars into his little school backpack, along with a jacket and a toothbrush. “Can we at least say goodbye to ’im before you guys take ’im?” he asked, handing the backpack to the social worker.

“Yes, you can definitely do that,” she said.

Mike kneeled down in the dust in front of his grandson. “Hey Aston, you’re gonna go with these nice people for just a while, so Mommy and I can find you a house, would you like that?”

“No.” Aston shook his head.

“But if we could get a house, we could get a dog. Wouldn’tcha like that?”

The dejected look on Aston’s face brightened. “Can he be like Scooby Doo?” he asked.

“He may be a little different than Scooby Doo, but we can look for one the same color,” Mike said, uncharacteristic tears welling up in his eyes. “Go say bye to your mother,” he added, guiding his shoulder to turn toward Ciarra.

Ciarra gave a sigh of defeat and put a hand against her forehead, turning around to try to repress her tears. Aston jumped up on her, completely unaware of what was actually occurring. She picked him up and held his head flat against her neck. “Hey Mommy, Pop Pop said I could get a dog. Can you find a house soon?” Aston asked, suddenly more excited about the reason for needing to go with the strange people standing in the lot than apprehensive.