I had known, vaguely, that Bobbie had family living with her. I'd seen a white Jeep in her driveway, and a dark sedan, and a lanky teenager with a lacrosse stick getting out of one or the other, and a man in a quarter-zip carrying grocery bags in on a Saturday. I had never connected the man in the quarter-zip to the assistant principal of my son's school, because I'd met Lyndon Harrower exactly once, at orientation, in a gymnasium full of six hundred people, and because why would I. People live where they live.
"Does Mr. Harrower know you're the one who named his son?"
"Mr. Ferraro said he'd pass it to administration." Izzy's voice was very small. "Mr. Harrower is administration."
"Did anything happen after? Did Cade say anything to you? Did anyone?"
"Cade looked at me in the hallway. Like, looked. A couple times. That's all." He paused. "And Mr. Harrower moved me. My locker. Two weeks ago. He said it was a maintenance thing."
I got up and went to the kitchen and stood at the counter and put both my hands flat on it, the way I had in the main office, and breathed the way I tell patients to breathe when they're fighting the vent: slow, slow, let the machine do the work. Then I went back and sat down, closer to him this time.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because he said not to." His eyes were wet. "And because you were so proud of me. About Colby. And I didn't want—" Another block. Long. I waited. "I didn't want it to turn into a whole thing. I wanted it to just be the good thing."
I put my arm around him then, and for the first time since Thursday he let me, and leaned his head on my shoulder, which he hadn't done since he was twelve, and he was too long for it now and had to slouch half off the couch to manage it, and he did anyway.
"I asked you if they were yours," I said into his hair. "In that office. I'm never going to stop being sorry about that."
"I know," he said. "It's okay. You asked. But you didn't believe it. I could tell. Your face didn't believe it."
I don't know whether that was true. I've decided to let him have it.
Ruthanne Ebbesen's office was above a vacuum repair shop on Main Street in downtown Halverton, up a flight of stairs that smelled like motor oil and old carpet. She had a desk buried in banker's boxes, a window unit air conditioner that rattled even in October, and a dog, a heavy old yellow Labrador named Judge Wapner who slept on a crib mattress in the corner and did not get up for anyone.