Chapter 12: Administrative Leave

Dean picked my son up like he had done it a hundred times.

He hoisted Eli onto his hip, and Eli laid his head on Dean's shoulder.

The shovel stopped again next door.

Nobody on Maple Street was pretending to look at a gutter anymore.

"Put him down," I said.

"Cal, he's cold. Let me just..."

"Put him down, Dean."

"You knew," Freja said.

She had come around me, and she stood in front of her husband in the middle of the snowy driveway with her hands loose at her sides.

"You looked at that boy. You knew the whole time."

Dean's mouth worked.

"I found out four years ago," he said. "Lindsay told me. I wanted to tell you, Freja, I wanted..."

"You told me you never wanted children."

"I didn't want them with..."

He stopped.

I watched the end of that sentence land on her face.

She didn't cry.

She nodded slowly, once, her expression hardening.

"Nine years," she said. "Every time I cried in the bathroom, you said 'maybe someday.' You said it was my fault, my body, my timing."

"That was a long time ago."

"It was this winter."

She hit him.

It was a good, clean, open-handed slap that rang across the whole street.

A woman across the road said, "Oh my," and didn't look away.

Dean's head turned with the blow, and when it came back there was a red print on his cheek.

For the first time he looked like the man he was.

Freja took Eli's small foot in her hand, found it cold through the sock, and pulled her own scarf off and wrapped it around his toes.

"Hi, buddy," she said, very softly.

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