“Sarah, you can’t just barge in here,” she began.

I slammed the green composition notebook down onto her desk, right on top of her neat stack of files.

“I have the fingerprint report, Diane,” I said, my voice carrying through the open door into the main office where three other staff members were watching. “The lab found the second set of prints. And Mrs. Gable has the deleted database logs from three weeks ago.”

Diane’s face went from pale to a dull, dusty gray in about three seconds.

Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.

“It’s just a creative writing project,” she finally stammered, her voice losing all of its country club polish. “My son is a good boy. He’s just under a lot of pressure.”

“He put my son’s name on a list, Diane,” I said, leaning over her desk, my face inches from hers. “And you tried to destroy my boy’s life to hide your own failure.”

Just then, the outer office door opened.

Two police officers walked in, followed by the detective who had interrogated Toby.

Mrs. Gable had called them while I was walking down the hall.

They took Diane’s son out of his fourth-period class five minutes later.

He didn’t fight. He just walked with his head down, looking incredibly small and frail.

Diane was escorted out of the building through the front doors, in full view of the school buses and the parents who were arriving early for pickup.

She was fired by the school board that evening, and the local news ran a story about the “administrative cover-up” at Oak Creek High.

But I didn’t watch the broadcast.

I turned the TV off.

Toby was cleared of all charges, and the principal called me personally to apologize, but I didn’t want to hear it.

The school was still the same gray building, smelling of floor wax and stale lunch.

We decided that Toby would finish the semester online.

It is a Tuesday night now, a few weeks after everything happened.

The radiator in our living room is clanking, trying to fight off the Toledo cold.

I made some cheap frozen pizza, and we’re sitting at the kitchen table.

Toby is drawing an old steam engine, his hand moving carefully across the white paper.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a blue plastic pen.

The cap is already chewed flat.

He looks up at me, just for a second, and then goes back to his drawing.

We don’t talk about the yellow paper, or the police station, or the $1,800 that is gone from my savings.

We don’t talk about how I didn’t believe him at first.

We’re just eating our pizza.

I want to say everything is perfect now, that we’re closer than ever, but that would be a lie.

Trust is a heavy thing. Once you drop it, it takes a long time to pick up all the pieces.

Mostly, I’m just glad he’s here, chewing on his pens, in our quiet apartment where nobody is coming for him.