They didn’t come over. They didn’t wave. They didn’t make a thing of it.
Eli got out of the car and went straight for the slide and I sat down on the opposite bench with my heart going like a rabbit, and nothing happened. Nothing happened for fifty minutes. It was the single most ordinary hour of the entire year and I nearly came apart from it.
When we left, Walt raised two fingers off his coffee cup. That was all.
They were there the next Saturday too. And the one after.
By the fourth week I’d worked out what I was looking at. They weren’t guarding Eli. Nobody at that park was going to touch my son.
They were guarding the thing that had actually been taken, which was my nerve. For four years I’d gone out in public braced, scanning, doing threat assessment at a playground like it was a combat zone, and a kid can feel that in your hand. Eli had been absorbing my fear through my palm since he was five.
