It’s a Tuesday. John doesn’t work on Tuesdays, so all three of us go down to the school. He’s pushing you slowly, as he always does, careful for pebbles or cracks in the pavement that might stop your chair with a jerk. He has a brighter countenance these days. I wake every morning with an edge of dread in my gut, yet I don’t dare go to wake him up. I did that for the first few days last winter, after we found him waiting for us on the porch, but the anxiety I felt between turning his doorknob and finding him perfectly fine, asleep in his bed, sent my heart near to bursting. So I had to let that go, and now I wait for him to come down, but there’s still something in the waiting for him that gnaws at me.

But never mind. Here we are. We walk along the parking lot where the bottom of the chain-link fence has been pushed out from years of snowplows shoving snow out to the edges of the lot.

“Watch yourself,” I tell John, as I always do when we walk that stretch. “Don’t cut yourself on that chain link. You’ll need a tetanus shot for sure.”

In the past, me warning him more than once about something would have sent him either into a rant about me being overprotective or down into a dark, simmering quiet from which he would not emerge all day. But now when I say things like this, he’s able to brush them away gently.

“Got it, Dad,” he says, and I feel myself blushing at my inability to stop warning him of the same old things. Like when he goes to work and I tell him to “make good choices.”

We pass the old, abandoned building you hid in—was it only last fall? You show no signs of recognizing it. The next time we’re walking this stretch without John, maybe I’ll stop and turn you toward the old building, ask if you remember hiding in there last September, telling me about the map and the silver-haired woman. I could even carry you inside and we could sit together in that empty darkness. Would that bring you back to me?

“Come on in, you guys,” Ms. Howard says in a kind voice. She always waits for us by the back door. She’s not so bad.

The hallway through your school is one of my favorite places now, almost like a second home. Teachers peek their heads out and wave, pat you on the head, or bend down level with you and ask how your day was. This is why we arrive early, to make sure we have enough time to navigate all the love that waits for you in the hall.

I see Ms. Pena up ahead, pretending to go back into her room. I know she’ll come out as we’re passing and pretend it’s by chance. And she does.