After the room unfroze, after the grandparents gasped and Eric stood up too fast and knocked his chair over, I took my son’s face in my hands and I asked him the only thing that mattered.
“Jeremy. Where did Daddy take her?”
And my boy, who had not spoken in eight years, answered me.
“Aunt Diane’s,” he whispered. “He said he was taking her to Aunt Diane’s.”
Eric was already reaching for his coat.
My father — Janice’s grandfather, a soft-spoken man I had never once seen raise his voice — stood up and put himself between Eric and the door.
“Sit down,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere until the police get here.”
What came out, over the next terrible weeks, was this.
Eric had not meant for Janice to fall.
But when she did, and when he pulled her out alive, he saw — in the space of a few panicked seconds — a way to solve every problem he’d been quietly carrying.
