Chapter 2

The Trask County sheriff’s substation smelled like burnt coffee and wet floor wax. At nine that night, Deputy Parr sat me in a plastic chair under fluorescent light that buzzed like a trapped fly. My hands still smelled like cold gravel. Owen was with my brother Dale in the lobby, wrapped in Dale’s Carhartt coat, drinking a vending machine hot chocolate he was too scared to finish.

Parr had a folder open. Inside it was a still frame from Ellis’s second phone. My back. My hands on Ellis’s chest. Ellis’s eyebrow, already bleeding. The time stamp read 3:34 p.m.

“Mr. Ward came in at six,” Parr said. “Filed first.”

“He was making my son stand barefoot on a concrete step in fourteen-degree air,” I said. “Holding a dictionary. For a camera.”

Parr didn’t write that down. He looked at me the way county people look at a man who has already been typed into a story. “Mr. Ward says the boy was being disciplined for wetting his pants. He says you arrived early, forced the door, knocked over his equipment, and assaulted him in front of the child.”

“He was filming him.”

“He says it was a family correction session.”

The phrase sat in the room like a dead animal. I didn’t know then that he sold those sessions. I only knew the red light had been on before I ever touched the door.

“Where’s Tessa’s statement?” I asked.

Parr turned a page. “Ms. Brandt declined to give one tonight.”

“She was standing right there.”

“She says she didn’t see the shove.”

I laughed, once, ugly. “She didn’t see it? She was ten feet away.”

Parr’s jaw worked. He wasn’t cruel. That was almost worse. He was just tired and done and already deciding what kind of man I was. “You put hands on him, Mr. Reyes. He has a cut that needed two butterflies. The boy wasn’t injured. You were.”

“The boy had no shoes.”

“CPS will look at that.”

“CPS already looked at him,” I said. “Two times. Tessa called them. Nothing stuck.”

Parr’s pen stopped. He looked up. I hadn’t known I knew that. Tessa had never told me. The words had come out of some locked place in my chest, maybe something I’d guessed and only now understood. October. December. The long sleeves. The way she stood with her hands hidden. The way she said nothing even when saying something might have saved her.

Parr wrote for a while. Then he told me the exchange order had been amended. No contact. My next two Sundays were gone. Supervised visits only, if the court granted them. The clip was already at the prosecutor’s office, he said. It had gone over at 7:20 p.m.

“You’re telling me Ellis Ward drove from Cinder Road to the prosecutor’s office on a Sunday night before I even got my boots off?”

Parr didn’t answer that.

When I stood up, he said, quiet, almost off the record, “Who’s the guy with the camera?”

I looked at him. “What?”

“The one in the mudroom. The tripod. Who’s he recording for?”

I didn’t have an answer. I walked out into the lobby. Dale stood up. Owen was asleep in the plastic chair, hot chocolate cold in his lap, his bare feet tucked under Dale’s coat. I lifted him and carried him out to the van. He didn’t wake. He just curled into my chest like he was still trying to make himself small enough for a lens I couldn’t see.