My son and his wife asked me to watch their two-month-old baby while they went shopping. But no matter how I held him or tried to calm him, he kept crying uncontrollably. I immediately sensed something was wrong. When I lifted his clothes to check his diaper… I froze. There was something there… something unimaginable. My hands started shaking. I grabbed him and rushed straight to the hospital.

My heart began to beat so hard it was visible in the hollow of my throat.

“What is it?”

He hesitated.

Then he pointed at the image.

“There’s internal bleeding.”

I heard the words. I understood the words. But for a second they had no place to land.

“What?”

“It looks like there’s trauma in the abdominal tissue. Not catastrophic, but significant. Enough that we need to treat him immediately.”

I felt the floor tilt.

“Trauma?”

He looked at Noah. Then at me.

“It appears someone squeezed him very hard around the abdomen.”

The room seemed to contract.

“Squeezed?” I repeated, because I needed the absurdity of the word said twice before I could absorb it.

“Yes.”

He turned back to the screen as if it might help to keep his eyes on something clinical.

“In infants this small, the tissues and organs are extremely vulnerable. Pressure that would not seriously injure an older child can do real damage to a baby.”

My mind went blank.

Then it filled all at once with terrible, useless things.

A hand.

A body.

Someone losing control.

Someone angry.

Someone not angry but careless in the wrong way.

“Are you saying someone hurt him?”