Locked in for what felt, to a four-year-old, like a very long time.
Though I still don’t know exactly how long it actually was.
She told me, in the careful, halting way small children explain things they don’t fully understand themselves, that Miriam had told her more than once that if she ever said anything, I would get sad and leave the way Mommy left.
That it would be Josie’s fault.
I understood, sitting there, exactly why she’d waited two years to say a single word.
She hadn’t been protecting a secret.
She’d been protecting me.
In the only way a four-year-old knew how.
By carrying something alone rather than risk losing the only parent she had left.
I called Josie’s pediatrician first thing.
A woman named Dr. Halloran who’d known her since birth.
I explained what I’d seen and what Josie had told me.
She saw us within the hour.
The bruising on Josie’s arm was, in Dr. Halloran’s careful clinical language, “consistent with a gripping injury rather than a fall.”
She documented it thoroughly.
Photographs.
Measurements.
A written statement.
The kind of paperwork I hadn’t known existed until I suddenly needed it.
“I’m required to file a report,” she told me. “Given what you’ve described. I want you to know that before I do it, not after.”
