She ate like the food might be reclaimed: fast, head down, eyes moving between him and the doorway. When he slid a second helping onto her plate, she froze completely.
"Can I really have more?"
Four words. He would hear them in his sleep for years.
"You can have as much as you want," he said, and his voice came out steady, which he considered the single greatest performance of his career. "Always. There's always more in this house."
She ate the second helping even faster than the first. And when he reached across the table for the salt, his son threw both arms up over his face.
That afternoon, Thomas told his office he'd be unreachable and made three phone calls.
The first was to Dr. Angela Ruiz, who had been Clare's college roommate and was now the children's pediatrician. He asked her to come to the house: no appointment, no file, just come. She was there in ninety minutes. She examined both children in the upstairs bedroom with the door shut. It took her forty minutes, and when she came out, her jaw was set in a way Thomas had never seen on her before.
"Tom," she said, sitting down across from him. "I'm going to say this plainly because you need to hear it plainly: Emma is significantly underweight. She's lost weight since her last visit. A lot of it. Noah has fallen entirely off his growth curve. There are bruises on Emma's arms in four different stages of healing, which means they happened on four different days. She flinched when I touched her upper back."
Thomas heard the words arrive one at a time, like nails.
"There's something else," Dr. Ruiz said. "Kids who've been hurt at home usually protect the person hurting them. Emma apologized to me twice for taking up my time."
"Document all of it," Thomas said. "Photographs, measurements, everything."