The vibe at the police station had been mostly calm, but there were undercurrents of panic—officers hurrying out of the station in groups, whispers, the phone ringing off the hook. Andrea and the others were terrified and confused at what had gone down, and who might have hurt them and Piper, and—the scariest thing of all—why they couldn’t go to their children. The police assured them they’d get through their questions as quickly as possible and that their kids would be taken care of . . . but how did they know?

The twenty or so minutes Andrea waited in an interrogation room felt like days. She hadn’t been asked to turn in her phone, so she used the tense, scary time of waiting to call Jerry. “This . . . thing happened,” she’d said. “I’m okay, and I think Arthur’s okay, but . . . but I don’t know.”

Jerry asked her to slow down, start over. When she told him she’d stumbled into some sort of “attack” in the office hallway of Arthur’s new school, Silver Swans, Jerry interrupted, in his barking, old-man voice, “Silver Swans? He’s going to school there?”

“Yes . . . ,” Andrea said. “I told you that.” In fact, Jerry had been the one, indirectly, to tell her about Silver Swans.

Jerry couldn’t make it to the station right then—he was with Susan at a chemo appointment. “Don’t say anything to the police,” he advised her.

“But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I know. But still, don’t say anything. I’ll make some calls. I’ll make sure Arthur is okay. Don’t worry.”

Five minutes later, Jerry called her back to say that the kids at Silver Swans were fine. How he cut through the red tape and found this out, she didn’t know. “Parents are allowed to pick them up,” he told her. “So if you’ve got someone who can run over . . .”

“Great,” Andrea gushed. “Thank you.” She hung up immediately and called Martina, the babysitter who sometimes watched Arthur. Thankfully, she was free. The sooner Martina could get Arthur out of that place, the better.

Moments after that, Andrea’s officer, named Detective Allegra, a young man with scraped-raw cheeks and a cowlick, walked into the room and shut the door. He’d looked her up and down suspiciously, and Andrea felt a sinking feeling. Please just let this be civil, she prayed. She was grateful when Allegra wrenched his gaze away.

He asked her what she’d been doing in that hallway, and she’d told the committee story that they’d planned. It was uncomfortable to lie, but she didn’t know any other way. Allegra had looked at something on his notes and then said, “Says here you had a meeting with Ms. Jovan yesterday.”

“What?” Andrea blurted. “H-How do you know that?”