I grew up. I went to college. I became a pediatric psych nurse. Now I spend my days at a locked-down pediatric psych ward in Boston, working with the six-year-old boy who’s already hearing voices, the eight-year-old girl who self-mutilates, the twelve-year-old big brother who absolutely, positively can’t be left alone with his younger siblings.

We’re an acute care facility. We don’t fix these kids. We stabilize them, using proper medications, a nurturing environment, and whatever other tricks we can pull out of our sleeves. Then we observe. We try to figure out what makes each child tick, and we write up recommendations for the next set of experts who will ultimately deal with these kids, either at a residential program, or a long-term-care institution, or a supervised return to the home environment.

Some of our kids make progress. They become the best person they can be, a triumph by anyone’s definition. Some of our children commit suicide. Others commit murder. They become that headline you’ve read in the paper: “Troubled Youth Opens Fire”; “Older Brother Slaughters Entire Family.” And people die, whether they had anything to do with it or not.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I took this job to save lost children like me. Or perhaps, even more heroically, I took this job to avert tragedies like the one that happened to my family.

I understand what you’re thinking.

But you don’t know me yet.

Part 1 - Thursday

Chapter One

CHAPTER
ONE

Thursday night, Sergeant Detective D.D. Warren was out on a date. It wasn’t the worst date she’d ever been on. It wasn’t the best date she’d ever been on. It was, however, the only date she’d been on in quite some time, so unless Chip the accountant turned out to be a total loser, she planned on taking him home for a rigorous session of balance-the-ledger.

So far, they’d made it through half a loaf of bread soaked in olive oil, and half a cow seared medium rare. Chip had managed not to talk about the prime rib bleeding all over her plate or her need to sop up juices with yet another slice of bread. Most men were taken aback by her appetite. They needed to joke uncomfortably about her ability to tuck away plate after plate of food. Then they felt the need to joke even more uncomfortably that, of course, none of it showed on her girlish figure.

Yeah, yeah, she had the appetite of a sumo wrestler but the build of a cover girl. She was nearly forty, for God’s sake, and well aware by now of her freakish metabolism. She certainly didn’t need any soft-middled desk jockey pointing it out. Food was her passion. Mostly because her job with Boston PD’s homicide unit didn’t leave much time for sex.