"There's more," Ms. Hollis said gently. "I wasn't going to show you this in front of her, but—" She took a photograph out of the folder, printed on plain paper. It showed a kindergarten cubby, the little wooden kind with a name tag on top. LULU, in glitter letters. Inside, under her spare sweater, someone had pulled back the fabric to show a heap of food: graham crackers, a crushed muffin, applesauce pouches, a dozen plastic-wrapped cheese sticks, napkins folded around things he couldn't identify.
"I found it two weeks ago," the teacher said. "I didn't take it away. I didn't want her to panic. I just started putting an extra snack in her cubby every morning, so she'd know there was always one. She stopped taking from the other kids after that. But she never stopped saving."
Andre stared at the photograph. He had wanted, ever since last night, for something to make it less true. A misunderstanding. A grudge from an angry eight-year-old. He had wanted that badly, and he was ashamed of how badly. The picture of the cubby took the last of it away.
"I'm required to report," Mrs. Dunleavy said. "You should know that. I'm a mandated reporter, and so is Ms. Hollis. I filed with Children's Services yesterday afternoon, after the third note went unanswered and the weight came back. I'm sorry I didn't reach you first. I didn't know who I'd be reaching."
He understood what she meant. She hadn't known which parent was the problem. She hadn't known if it was both.
"No," he said. "No, you did right. You did — thank you. I mean it."
He wanted to say something else, something about the nights, the deployments, Louisville and Dayton and the new grill in the backyard. But there was nothing to say that would not sound like an excuse, so he folded his big hands on his knees and asked the only thing that seemed worth asking.
"What do I do now?"
Mrs. Dunleavy wrote down the name of a pediatrician who took his insurance and could see Lulu that week. Ms. Hollis wrote down her own cell phone number, which she said she did not give to parents, and which she said he could text at any hour.
The caseworker called him that afternoon. Her name was Gail Moreno, and she had a flat, practical voice and a way of asking questions twice in different words, and she came to his mother's house on Saturday and sat at the yellow kitchen table and talked to each of the children alone in the den with the door half open.
Andre waited in the kitchen. He had known, in the part of him that read the news, that this was how it worked. He had still not been ready for how it felt to sit outside a room while a stranger asked his children whether they were safe with him.
When Ms. Moreno came out, she put her notepad away and looked at him for a long moment.
"Your son," she said, "told me he keeps data."
"Yes, ma'am."
"I'd like to make a copy of that notebook."
"You can have whatever you need."