Only then did Naomi let herself remember how she had arrived.
It had begun with a text from Denise Blake—Connor's mother—at 11:47 a.m., while Naomi sat in a glass conference room downtown reviewing discovery timelines for a housing discrimination case that had nothing and everything to do with power.
Denise's message was not elegant. It was panicked and misspelled and perfect in its urgency: naomi theyve got isaiah in band room something wrong Connor says Briggs has him down on the podium Im calling office please go if youre close.
Naomi had stood so fast her chair rolled into the wall. She did not ask permission. She told her supervising attorney, Marta Okonkwo, three sentences: my son, school, emergency. Marta nodded once and pointed at the door. The black folder under Naomi's arm was not related to Isaiah at all; it held mediation notes she had forgotten to set down. She carried it like a talisman of the adult world she was leaving mid-sentence.
The drive from downtown to Millbrook took fourteen minutes with every light cursed and every other driver treated as an obstacle. She had rehearsed, in those fourteen minutes, a hundred versions of what she might find. A fight. A medical scare. A teacher who had yelled too hard. She had not rehearsed the exact geometry of a grown man's hand on her child's neck.