“Hannah.
Look at me for a second.”
She looked up.
“When Pamela told you to stay in there — did she close the door?”
“She pulled it.”
“Did she lock it?”
Hannah frowned.
She was genuinely puzzled by the question, which was the answer.
“I don’t know.
I didn’t try it.”
“You didn’t try the door.”
“She said stay in here.”
I stopped walking.
There is a particular thing that happens to a man’s chest, and I have never found the words for it and I am not going to find them here.
My daughter had sat on a tile floor for forty minutes, next to a running commercial dryer, in a dress she had chosen out of a catalog in October, four feet from an unlocked door, because an adult had said stay.
And she was not upset about it.
That was the worst part.
She was not indignant, she was not crying, she was not saying Dad, she made me.
