An officer asked whether Noah had said anything else on the phone before the line disconnected. I repeated every word exactly.
Saying it out loud in that room changed it. The sentence became solid. It stopped being panic and turned into something heavier.
Mom’s boyfriend hit me with a baseball b@t. Four-year-old voices are not built to carry words like that, but his had.
One of the officers wrote while another photographed the room, the coffee table, the dent near the wall, the toy truck overturned nearby.
Tiny details started looking obscene to me: a half-eaten sandwich, the television still on, Lena’s shoes by the kitchen door.
She had not even been there, and somehow she was everywhere, in every ordinary object that kept insisting this was a home.
At the hospital, Noah sat in my lap for registration because he refused to let go of my shirt for even a second.
Every time a nurse approached, he looked at me first, not because he was asking permission, but because he needed proof I stayed.
His arm was not broken. The doctor said that with careful relief, as if he were handing me good news wrapped in bad news.
There was deep bruising, swelling, and marks that did not belong on a child, and they wanted scans just to be certain.
Derek waited in the hallway while I went with Noah, then bought him apple juice from a machine he had to hit twice.
When he handed it over, Noah took it with both hands, then winced, and Derek looked away before his face did something dangerous.
“Thanks, Uncle Derek,” Noah whispered. It was the first full sentence he had said since I arrived, and the hallway went quiet.
Derek nodded once, too quickly, and cleared his throat. “You don’t gotta thank me for that, little man. Never for that.”
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