The fourth was a friend of fifteen years who told me, in a bar in Old Colorado City, that a nine-year-old will say anything and that I had blown up my life on a child’s account of a conversation she was not equipped to interpret.
I asked him whether he would want a version of that argument used about his own daughter.
We have not spoken since, and I regret it, and I would do it again.
And then there were about seven people who did something I had not remotely expected, which was to come and tell me things.
Emily from Hannah’s school called on the Tuesday.
She had noticed, in the spring, that Hannah had twice been picked up by “her stepmom” without the office being notified, and had thought it was odd and had done nothing, and had been thinking about it since Saturday.
The mother of a girl in Hannah’s class said, carefully, on a sidewalk, that at a birthday party in February she had heard Pamela describe Hannah to another parent as “a lot, since her mom.” She had assumed she’d misheard the tone.
And the pediatrician’s office called, which I had not expected at all, because the pediatrician had made a note in January after two Saturday stomachaches and had wanted, five months later, to make sure that somebody had followed up on it.
Seven people, all of whom had seen a corner of it, none of whom had seen enough to feel entitled to say anything.
That is the shape of these things.
Not one villain and one blind man.
Nine or ten decent people each holding a fragment that only means something next to the others, and no mechanism anywhere for putting the fragments on the same table.
Part Eleven: What My Daughter Had Been Holding
It came out over about five weeks, in pieces, mostly not to me.
Dr.
Nadia Roshan is a child psychologist in Colorado Springs who works almost exclusively with military families, which is why I picked her, and who told me at our first meeting — mine, alone, before Hannah ever went — that she would be seeing my daughter without me in the room and that I should prepare myself for that.
“You are going to want to be in there,” she said.
“You should not be in there.
