Chapter 14 — WHAT THOMAS FOUND

Eleven days after Bellamy's, I finally asked my son the right question.

I had been asking *what did the message say*, and he kept saying it was from a woman and he did not know her, and I had built a whole affair out of that.

I asked instead: "Was there anything attached to it?"

And Thomas said, "There was a spreadsheet."

I said, "What was on it?"

"Names of kids." He shrugged. "And dates. And a column that said UNF."

He had turned his father's phone face up at 10:20 at night on the twenty-second of October, and read one message from a woman he did not know that said *these are the ones from the 2024 batch that are still open*, and opened the attachment, and looked at a list of children's names.

And my son — twelve years old, who I had let close his door and stop having friends over and flinch at a bowl — screenshotted it.

He screenshotted it because it looked wrong, and he did not know why it looked wrong, and then his father came downstairs with wet hair and saw him holding the phone.

That is what the parking garage was about.

It was never the affair. There was no affair. The woman is a records clerk at a subcontractor in Scranton and she is now a cooperating witness.

Daniel took the phone off him, deleted the screenshot, and told him to get in the car.

He drove our son to a municipal parking structure four blocks from our house at eleven o'clock at night.

He did not take him home.

That is the detail that Odalys says will do more work at trial than anything else in the file, and it is the one I cannot think about for more than about ten seconds at a time.

He drove him somewhere else first.

And Thomas said the screenshot had been deleted from the phone but that he had already sent it to himself, because he is twelve years old and grew up on an iPad, and sending yourself a screenshot is as automatic as breathing.

It was in his email.

It had been in his email for eleven days while I built a story about an affair.