"You didn’t call."
"No."
She nodded, slowly, as if this were a piece of evidence being entered into a record.
"After I couldn’t get you," she said, "I went out to the garage and sat in my car. With the door shut, so he couldn’t hear. I took photos of his legs first. Then I sat in the car and I dialed nine-one-one." She turned her phone over on the table, then turned it back. "I dialed it, and I sat there with my thumb over the button. For a long time. Twenty minutes, maybe."
"You didn’t call."
"No." She looked up at him. "Do you know why I didn’t call?"
He did. He thought he did. But he wanted to hear her say it.
"Because all I could think about was that car," she said. "The deputy slowing down. All I could think was, this whole thing happened because she was terrified of a man in a uniform looking at her grandson for too long. And if I pressed that button, a man in a uniform would come to this house. Into this kitchen. He’d stand where you’re standing and he’d look at your mother, and maybe he’d put his hand on her arm, and maybe she’d say something, the way she does—" Danielle shook her head. "And I would be the one who brought him here. I couldn’t do it. I hated myself, sitting there. I still do. I thought, if it were anyone else’s child, any other woman, I’d have called before the bath water was cold. But I couldn’t make the thing she was afraid of come through our front door."
"So you packed."