I didn’t scream. I wish I could say I did something fierce. I just said, real quiet, “Get your stuff.” He started in with the “babe, come on,” and I said it again. “Get your stuff and get out.” He grabbed his keys, called me a crazy something on his way to the door, and he was gone.

I locked it and I sat on the floor in the hallway outside Tyler’s room and I stayed there most of the night.

The CPS report and the X-rays did the rest. I gave the detective everything, including the threat he made standing in my living room. Mark was arrested eleven days later. He took a plea so it never went to trial. Felony. He’s not allowed within a thousand feet of my son. I keep the paper that says so in the kitchen drawer and sometimes I just look at it to make sure it’s real.

People want me to feel like the hero of this. I’m not. The hero is a six-year-old who couldn’t tell me with his words so he told me with a crayon, because he figured out at six that a picture was safer than his own mouth. I’m the woman who saw the apples and looked away.

Tyler’s in therapy now. He’s eating toast again. That sounds small but I cried in the kitchen the first morning he asked for it. He still doesn’t talk much about that time, and I don’t push.

But a couple weeks ago he climbed in my lap out of nowhere and I asked him, real soft, why he drew himself without a mouth that day.

He thought about it. Then he said, “So you’d ask me about it.” And he put his face against my neck and that was the end of the conversation.

I’m the one who’s supposed to protect him. He was the one drawing a way to save us both.

I don’t know how you make peace with that. I haven’t yet.