“Mrs. Dawson, your son drew something today that I need you to see.”

The counselor slid the paper across her desk like it was something fragile. A family drawing. Three stick figures. Me on one side.

Tyler in the middle. And a man next to him with two red scribbled hands.

I almost laughed. He’s six. Kids draw monsters and dogs with six legs. “He’s little,” I said. “Kids draw weird stuff.” But she wasn’t smiling back at me, and that’s when my chest started doing something I didn’t like.

She tapped the middle figure. Tyler had drawn himself with no mouth. Just a blank face. “I asked him about it,” she said. “He went quiet for a long time. Then he whispered something to me.” She looked down at her notes like she didn’t want to say it out loud.

“He said, ‘If I don’t have a mouth, I can’t tell. And if I can’t tell, he won’t squeeze.'”

I heard the word “squeeze” and everything in me just went still. Mark. My boyfriend. Fourteen months we’d been together. He watched Tyler every afternoon while I pulled the 2-to-10 at the warehouse. Fifteen eighty an hour. I needed those hours. I told myself I was lucky to have a guy who’d babysit so I could keep us afloat.

The counselor kept talking but it was coming through water. Then I caught one sentence clear as a bell. “We’ve already contacted CPS. They’re asking for a medical evaluation.”

I want to be honest about something, because I’ve gone over it a thousand times since. There were things. Little things. Tyler stopped eating crunchy stuff. Apples, toast, the cereal he used to love. He’d push it around and say his teeth hurt.

I figured he was being picky. I had a dentist appointment I kept meaning to make and kept pushing because money was money. I told myself it was nothing. God, I told myself a lot of things back then.

Two days later I’m sitting in a pediatric office and they’re ordering an X-ray of my baby’s jaw. The radiologist, older guy, real quiet voice, calls me back into his little room. He puts the film up on the light box. I don’t know what I’m looking at. To me it’s just gray and white. He points with a pen.

“You see these three lines here?” Three of them. “Micro-fractures,” he said. “And they’re at different stages of healing.” I asked what that meant, even though some part of me already knew, the same part of me that had been ignoring the apples.