My son’s wife dropped off my grandson, her hands shaking as she said, “He’s just fussy.” But his screams weren’t normal. I lifted his onesie and saw his tiny back covered in black bruises. The ER doctor’s voice was cold, “This was not an accident. We found a healing rib fracture.” Then he told me the police had just found their abandoned car at the airport…
The wheels of the state began to churn with a sterile, mechanical inevitability the moment the head nurse looked at me. It wasn’t a look of sympathy; it was a look of professional appraisal, the kind reserved for witnesses of a crime that hadn’t yet been codified. I stood in the fluorescent glare of the…
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