I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to do an extensive, detailed Internet search on Grace—whose nondistinct last name—Brown—appears on the top of her preprinted school notepaper. After all, I’d long extolled the virtues of “researching” the people in your life for Well/er (“Prepping for your parent-teacher conference: Why not know more about the people grading your child?” “Will you trust your doctor more if you know where he/she went to medical school?” “Ruling out the unknown: how having a mental dossier about others can lower generalized anxiety”). But for some reason, I’d ignored her strangeness and her half answers the first time we talked—the oversharing about her eating disorder and obsessive personality; her nonanswer about whether or not she has children; her odd insistence that Charlotte was a therapy dog. Even last week after Nick told me that she and his father, Mr. Noah, were involved in an obviously secret relationship, I didn’t immediately start my background check. But now it’s time. Who is this person helping to run the school, cutting weird deals and sending “contracts” in the mail?

Despite over an hour of my online research efforts, the best I come up with is a few old posts on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Old ones. From a few years ago. Which produce an incomplete composite of who she is: someone with a strong interest in vegetarian cooking (with an emphasis on beets and cauliflower), an affiliation with an oboe chamber music group and a feminist drum circle, and expressed “likes” for a local female-owned craft brewery and The Container Store.

That’s it? Is the person making my son’s life a daily hell really a social media nonparticipant, occupying a black hole of personal information so that no one can know who she really is? Or is the biggest clue the most obvious of all: Doesn’t the fact that she has almost no footprint online mean she has something to hide?

* * *

When I return from around the corner with Teddy’s burrito, he comes into the kitchen and sits at the counter on the one big stool to eat the way he always did when he was little. I’m glad to see that despite the stress he’s under, he still has an appetite, evidenced by how he’s ripped the foil away and already has rice on his chin and sour cream on his lips. I could not possibly love him more. I think of my parents, how much they used to love to watch him eat when he was a baby and toddler—chicken, pasta, soup, cereal—how he actually smacked his lips when he chewed, how he intensely enjoyed every meal, how he rarely made a mess. He must have changed back into his pajamas while I was out, like he’s taking a sick day, which in a way he is, so I rub his back gently, making slow circles on the plaid flannel, and kiss him lightly on the head. His hair is coarser than it used to be, not the corn silk I remember, but I run my fingers through it anyway, thrilled that he lets me. Then I lean against the counter with my arms under the dog in the sling and watch him eat.