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a napkin and winds up with compound fractures in both femurs? You don’t need nineteen years on the job, like I have, to be suspicious of that one.
    I imagined Charlotte was falling apart at the seams—being away from you while you were hurting would rip her to pieces, and then knowing that Amelia was God knows where was even more devastating. I kept thinking of how Amelia used to hate to sleep with the lights off, how I’d have to creep into her room in the middle of the night and turn them off when she’d fallen asleep. Are you scared? I’d asked her once, and she’d said she wasn’t. I just don’t want to miss anything. We lived in Bankton, New Hampshire—a small town where you could actually drive down the street and have people honk when they recognized your car; a place where if you forgot your credit card at the grocery store, the checkout girl would just let you take your food and come back to pay later. That’s not to say that we didn’t have our share of the seedy underbelly of life—cops get to see behind the white picket fences and polished doors, where there are all kinds of hidden nightmares: esteemed local bigwigs who beat their wives, honors students with drug addictions, schoolteachers with kiddie porn on their computers. But part of my goal, as a police officer, was to leave all that crap at the station and make sure you and Amelia grew up blissfully naïve. And what happens instead? You watch the Florida police come into the emergency room to take your parents away. Amelia gets carted off to a foster-care facility. How much would this lousy attempt at a vacation scar you both?
    The detective had left me alone after two rounds of interrogation. This was his way, I knew, of hanging me out to dry—assuming that the information he was gathering between our little sessions would be enough to scare me into confessing that I’d broken your legs.
    I wondered if Charlotte was in this building somewhere, in another interrogation room, or a lockup. If they wanted to keep us here overnight, they had to arrest us—and they had grounds for that. A new injury had occurred here in Florida—that, coupled with the old injuries on the X-ray, was probable cause, until someone could corroborate our
explanations. But the hell with it—I was tired of waiting. You and your sister needed me.
    I stood up and banged on the glass mirror that I knew the detective was watching me through.
    He came back into the room. Skinny, redheaded, pimples—he couldn’t have been thirty yet. I weighed 225—all muscle—and stood six-three; for the past three years I’d won our department’s unofficial weight-lifting challenge during annual fitness testing. I could have snapped him in half if I wanted to. Which made me remember why he was questioning me in the first place.
    “Mr. O’Keefe,” the detective said. “Let’s go through this again.”
    “I want to see my wife.”
    “That’s not possible right now.”
    “Will you at least tell me if she’s okay?”
    My voice cracked on that last word, and it was enough to soften the detective. “She’s fine,” he said. “She’s with another detective right now.”
    “I want to make a phone call.”
    “You’re not under arrest,” the detective said.
    I laughed. “Yeah, right.”
    He gestured toward the phone in the middle of the desk. “Dial nine for an outside line,” he said, and he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, as if to make it clear that he wasn’t giving me any privacy.
    “You know the number for the hospital where my daughter’s being kept?”
    “You can’t call her.”
    “Why not? I’m not under arrest,” I repeated.
    “It’s late. No good parent would want to wake his kid up. But then you’re not a good parent, are you, Sean?”
    “No good parent would leave his kid alone at a hospital when she’s scared and hurt,” I countered.
    “Let’s get through what we need to here, and then maybe you’ll be able to catch your