The officer said my daughter’s first question was, “If I tell you, will you make sure my mom doesn’t have to come to the house alone?” He told her yes, and she finally pointed toward the parking lot across the street. She said there was a car there every Tuesday afternoon, always parked in the same spot, and that she had started noticing it in February. She’d written down the license plate numbers in the back of her math notebook because she thought I would tell her she was imagining things. Then, two weeks earlier, she had seen the man inside the car talking to someone from our house.
The officer asked who, and my daughter said my husband. I felt my stomach drop because my husband had told me he worked late every Tuesday. She said she had never told me because “Dad said it was grown-up stuff and you’d get upset.” Then she reached into her yellow coat and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. On it were eleven dates, eleven license plates, and one sentence she’d written at the bottom: “He only comes when Mom is at work.” The officer looked at me and asked whether I knew anyone who drove that car. I said no. Then my daughter whispered that she did.
She’d seen the man before. He was the same person who had come to our house the previous summer and stood in the driveway talking to my husband for almost an hour. My husband had called him “an old friend.” The officer took the paper, walked toward the parking lot, and asked my daughter to stay beside me. Before he left, she grabbed his sleeve and said, “There’s one more thing I didn’t write down.” He crouched beside her. She looked at me first, then back at him, and said, “The car wasn’t there on the Tuesdays when my dad said he was working. It was there on the Tuesdays when he said he was home.”
