There was a woman sitting in the chair across from his desk. She was wearing a sensible cardigan and a lanyard with an ID badge. She was a caseworker. She had my logbook open on her lap.

“I need your official report,” she said. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were searching mine. “The dated one. I need every detail you wrote down.”

I handed her the log. I felt a chill go through me that had nothing to do with the winter air. “Why? Is he okay?”

The caseworker stood up and closed the book. She didn’t look at my supervisor. She looked at me. “Tyler hasn’t been picked up, dropped off, or marked present on any bus in the district for two days.”

My breath hitched. “Where is he?”

“That’s what we need to know,” she said.

The room felt like it was closing in. I felt like the world had tilted on its axis. If he hadn’t been on my bus, and he hadn’t been at school, then he was missing. My mind raced through every dark scenario. Had she moved him? Had she taken him somewhere else?

“We tracked the mother’s phone,” the caseworker said, her voice dropping lower. “She pulled him out of school without notice. We have a lead, but it’s a long shot. The timing in your log, it matches the window when they cleared out of the house.”

She turned to the door, and for a second, I thought she was going to leave me in the dark.

“I’ll let you know,” she said, before walking out.

I went back to my bus. I sat in the driver seat and stared at the steering wheel. I thought about the boy who used to love dinosaurs.

I thought about the small, bruise-colored handprint on his arm. I waited for a phone call that felt like it would never come.

The next forty-eight hours were a blur of cold coffee and watching the clock. I didn’t drive my route; the school put me on administrative leave, a standard precaution they said, but it felt like punishment for knowing too much. I sat in my house, the phone sitting on the counter like a loaded weapon.

Then, on a Saturday, the phone finally rang.

It was the caseworker. Her voice was different. It wasn’t flat anymore. There was a warmth to it that made me exhale for the first time in a week.

“We found them,” she said.

My heart surged. “Is he okay?”

“He’s safe,” she told me. “We found them at a motel two counties over. The boyfriend was there. It wasn’t good, but we got there in time.”

She paused, and I could hear the rustle of papers on her end. “Your log was the key. It gave us the window we needed to pin down the departure time. It proved a pattern of abuse that the court took seriously. Tyler is with his grandmother now. He’s safe.”