Chapter 6 — THE DOORS WERE LOCKED

Sergio Delfín has managed Bellamy's for eleven years.

He was standing about fifteen feet away and he had been standing there since Thomas started crying, and he had not come over, which I thought at the time was tact and which was not tact.

He was waiting to see whether he was needed.

When I said *I'm taking the word of my son*, Sergio walked to the front doors and locked them.

He did it without hurrying and without announcing it and he put the key in his pocket, and then he went to the podium and picked up the phone and dialled three digits and said, quietly, "Bellamy's, Ardmore Hotel, ground floor. We have an assault on a minor from last night and the man's in the room."

Daniel heard the lock.

He turned around and looked at the doors and then at Sergio and then at me, and this is the moment the room changed, because until then it had been a family scene and now it was a public one.

He said, "Sergio."

Sergio said, "Mr Ashcombe, I've asked you to wait."

Daniel went for the kitchen.

Not fast. He walked, with the little half-smile still going, and he got about eleven feet before Marcus Weir — twenty-three years old, works the bar, played tight end for Cadmus Valley two years earlier — stepped into the doorway of the service corridor and did not move.

He did not touch my husband. He just stood in the door.

Daniel stopped.

And then he stood in the middle of that dining room, in front of about forty people who had all had dinner with us at some point, and did the arithmetic, and I watched him do it.

The police came in six minutes. Two officers, both young.

They did not arrest him that night.

I want to be accurate about this because people always assume they did. They took statements, they photographed Nick's face, they took his name and his date of birth, and one of them made a call from the doorway, and the older of the two told me that they would be referring it and that I should expect contact.

Daniel went home.

To our house.

That is the part nobody believes and it is the ordinary reality of these things. There was no order yet. It was his house. He slept in our bed and I slept in Thomas's room on the floor with the door locked, and Nick slept in the room over Sergio's garage because Sergio's wife Alma said so before anybody had finished asking.

At two in the morning I lay on the floor of my son's bedroom and started counting bruises.