“I checked on the house before midnight and everything seemed fine,” he replied smoothly. “Perhaps there is some confusion.”
“She wrote that you hurt her,” I said slowly as my heart pounded.
“That is a matter between you and your wife,” he answered before ending the call without another word.
The sudden silence of the line felt heavier than shouting, and I stared at the phone before calling my younger sister Julia Bennett who lived twenty minutes from the school. She woke up instantly when she heard the fear in my voice and said, “I am driving there right now and I will not leave until she is safe.”
While I booked the first flight from Seattle to Boston I kept calling my wife but every attempt went to voicemail, which made the quiet inside our house feel suspicious and wrong. I spent the next hours sitting on the edge of the hotel bed staring at the carpet while imagining my daughter alone in a school office with bloody feet.
Julia called at three thirty in the morning to say she had Emma with her and that the police had photographed bruises across her arms, legs, and back. “There is a clear handprint on her shoulder,” Julia said while her voice shook with anger.