My 8-year-old son started sleeping on the floor outside his grandma’s bedroom — and at 4 a.m., I heard him whisper, “I won’t let Uncle Craig do it to Grandma again.”

“That’s a twenty-pound chair.”

“It’s a ten-pound chair,” Lenora said. “Don’t confuse the patient.”

I laughed, and then I was crying, and she put down the chair and held me, small and strong, with her hand moving slowly between my shoulder blades.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she said into my hair.

“I’m sorry I didn’t see it.”

“You saw it,” she said. “You just saw it a little late. That’s all right. Dispatchers always arrive after the call.”

That night, I put Wyatt to bed.

Real bed.

Rocket-ship sheets and a lamp shaped like a moon.

He pulled the covers up to his chin, then looked at the doorway, where the old yellow night-light glowed in the hall.

For six weeks, that glow had lit a boy lying on a carpet.

Now it lit nothing but a stretch of empty beige, and my mother’s door, open a few inches, with the sound of a radio playing low.