Chapter 3

The holding room was really the health classroom. Posters about hand-washing and puberty covered the walls. I sat at a desk with a fake wood top and tried not to look at the diagram of a human heart.

Rhonda slid a piece of paper across to me. The county prosecutor wanted a deal. If I pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and accepted the no-trespass order, they would recommend no jail time. If I fought it, they would use my record. They would call me a boxer. They would say I punched a teacher in front of children. They would not care why.

“You admit the punch,” Rhonda said. “You admit the protective order violation. You ask the judge to consider context. That’s the safest road.”

“Safest road leads where?”

“Probation. Supervised visits. Maybe every other Saturday.”

I thought about Sadie’s forearm on January second. A bruise shaped like fingertips, purple-yellow at the edges. She had pulled her sleeve down when she saw me looking. Outside the community center, a coach’s whistle had blown, and she had covered her ears so hard her elbows shook.

“No deal,” I said.

Rhonda’s mouth thinned. “Jonah.”

“I’ll give a statement. Full statement.”

“You understand you’re admitting the assault?”

“I already admitted it. I punched him once. I’d do it again if he was hurting her.”

“Don’t say that to police.”

“I’ll say it to anybody.”

She studied me for a long moment, then pulled out her phone. “I’m calling your sister.”

Mara arrived twenty minutes later with snow in her dark hair and a paralegal’s calm that made her look older than thirty-two. She had been at the hearing, sitting in the back row. She hugged me, quick and hard.

“I found the janitor,” she said. “Hank Pruitt. He’s in the basement office. He’s scared, but he’ll talk to us.”

Rhonda looked at the door. “Police want your statement first.”

I gave it to Officer Dunne in the health classroom, with Rhonda beside me and a recorder on the desk. I told him about January ninth. I told him about picking Sadie up for a scheduled visit, about hearing a whistle from the hallway, about seeing Lyle’s hand wrapped around my daughter’s arm. I told him I said let her go. I told him Lyle smiled and told me to mind my own business. I told him I punched him once, in the jaw, and he fell.

“You know that doesn’t help you,” Dunne said.

“I know.”

“You could have called the police.”

“I did. In September. In October. Every time they said there was no evidence.”

Dunne’s jaw worked. He did not like me. But he wrote it down.

When they let me out, the hallway was crowded with folded chairs and wet boots. Corinne stood by the water fountain with Sadie’s coat over her arm. She saw me and looked away so fast it was like a door slamming.

“Corinne,” I said.

She kept walking.

Sadie was not with her. I did not know where my daughter was. I did not know who had her. I felt the old heat rise in my chest, the boxer’s heat, the thing that had put me in cuffs at nineteen and again at thirty-eight.

Rhonda touched my elbow. “Not here.”

I breathed. I looked at the water fountain dripping onto the floor.

“Find Hank,” I said.