Chapter 2 — WHAT THOMAS SAID

There is a specific thing that happens in a body when you hear a sentence that reorganises the previous year of your life.

Mine was in the hands. My hands went cold and then numb from the fingertips back, and I had to put one of them on the back of a chair.

I said, "Thomas."

He was crying and he did not stop and he did not sit down.

"Thomas, look at me. What did you just say?"

He said it again. He said it quieter and it was worse quieter.

"He took the blows Dad meant for me."

And the boy in the grey sweatshirt lifted his head.

I had spent ninety seconds in that room and had not once looked at his face.

There was a bruise around his left eye that went from the eyebrow down over the cheekbone and it was four or five days into being a bruise, which is the stage where it goes the colours nobody puts in a painting. There was a graze across the cheekbone with a scab broken open in the middle. There was dirt worked into the skin at his temple.

He was thirteen. He looked eleven.

And a tear came out of his good eye and went down through the dirt and left a clean line, and that is the image I still see when I cannot sleep, which is not every night any more but is still some nights.

I did the only correct thing I did in the first ten minutes.

I got down.

I crouched next to that chair so that I was below him, and I put my hands where he could see them, and I did not touch him.

I said, "What's your name?"

He looked at Thomas first. He asked my son with his eyes whether he was allowed to answer.

Thomas nodded.

"Nick."

"Nick, did my husband do that to your face?"

And Nick Vasquez said the first full sentence he ever said to me.

"He was doing it to him."