“I don’t want to alarm you,” the teacher said over the phone, her voice dropping into that quiet, careful rhythm that always makes your stomach sink.

She was calling from the elementary school office, and she hadn’t called my daughter Kayla first.

She called me. I was listed as the primary emergency contact because Kayla worked the night shift at the community hospital in Parma, Ohio.

I drove over on legs that did not feel like they belonged to my body. The snow was coming down in gray, slushy sheets, sticking to the salt-rusted wheel wells of my old Buick LeSabre. I parked in the yellow bus lane, leaving the engine running because my hands were shaking too badly to turn the key.

My granddaughter Ellie is six. She is bright, talkative, and narrates her entire life out loud. She draws on everything, usually with the cheap wax crayons I buy her from the dollar store near my apartment.

Her mother, my daughter Kayla, works three nights a week as an admitting clerk. Her boyfriend, Travis, had been living with them for about a year. He was a quiet man who worked at a local auto body shop. He always sat on the living room sofa with his dirty work boots on, staring at his phone, never quite looking me in the eye when I brought groceries over.

I never warmed to him. But Kayla was twenty-six, trying to raise a child on a clerk’s salary, and she was tired of being lonely. I bit my tongue because that is what mothers of adult children learn to do. I clipped my coupons, I minded my business, and I kept my mouth shut.

When I walked into the school office, the air smelled of floor wax and wet wool.

The teacher, Mrs. Gable, was holding a large piece of cream-colored construction paper. Ellie was sitting at a low plastic table in the corner, happily coloring a picture of a blue dog.

“Ellie drew her family today,” Mrs. Gable said, laying the paper down on the desk between us. “I wanted you to see it before she took it home.”

At first glance, it looked like any child’s drawing. There was stick-figure Ellie in a purple dress. There was stick-figure Kayla. There was Travis, labeled with the word “daddy” in crooked, childish print. And there was their golden retriever, Biscuit, drawn twice as large as anyone else.

But off to the right side of the paper, colored with a stubby navy blue crayon that had been worn down to its gray paper wrapper, was a fifth figure. It was a tall, dark stick-figure of a grown man. He was standing directly beside a small blue bed with a little girl in it.

My stomach did a slow, sickening flip. I felt a cold weight settle behind my ribs. I knelt down beside the low table, keeping my voice bright and cheerful.