"I know," he said again. "I brought her here so you would."
She looked at him over the glasses chain. "That's not nothing," she said. "A lot of fathers bring them to urgent care across the county line."
Noelle called the state monitoring program at eight that morning from her mother's kitchen in Ephrata, with Rosario on the other line from Ohio. By noon her license had been placed on inactive status pending evaluation. By two o'clock Dr. Hostetter had called her himself, and she told Emery afterward that he'd said the same thing he'd said two and a half years before, word for word, You do the program and I'll hold your chair, and then he'd said, but it might be a long time this time, Noelle, and I can't promise how long, and she had said she knew. On Sunday afternoon Hedy drove her out to the stone farmhouse by the pond outside Reading. The intake nurse remembered her. Noelle said that was the worst part, and also, somehow, not.
The caseworker came on Tuesday. Her name was Leona Kerrigan, and she was perhaps fifty, with gray locs tied back in a scarf and a canvas tote bag full of folders and a manner so calm and unhurried that Emery, who had dreaded her all weekend, found himself offering her coffee twice. She talked with him at the kitchen table for an hour. She talked with Linnea alone in her room for thirty minutes with the door open, and he sat at the bottom of the stairs and heard none of it except, once, his daughter laughing. Then Ms. Kerrigan came down and stood in front of the refrigerator for a long time with her hands in the pockets of her cardigan, reading the laminated plan and looking at the whiteboard and the nine pencil dots in the corner.
"She told me she made those," she said.
"She did."
"She told me she was afraid you'd erase them."
"I promised her I wouldn't."
Ms. Kerrigan nodded slowly. "I've been doing this nineteen years," she said. "I've seen a lot of refrigerators. You'd be surprised how often what I need is on the refrigerator." She turned around. "Here's what's going to happen, Mr. Brennecke. Nobody's taking your daughter anywhere. Your wife is going to have a safety plan with my office, the way your daughter has one with you. Her contact with Linnea is going to be supervised for now, by you or your sister or a counselor, until her treatment team and I agree it doesn't need to be. There'll be visits. There'll be paperwork. It's going to take months, not weeks." She paused. "And you're going to have to be home. That's the part of the plan that's about you."
"I know," he said. "I already told my boss."