“What are these?” she said. “Hand-stitched pity?”
“Mrs. Tilmot?” a man’s voice said from behind her.
The room shifted, and she turned.
***
Officer Warren wasn’t a stranger to me.
He’d come by our house two weeks earlier to take my dad’s statement after the school finally opened a formal review into Mrs. Tilmot. He was one of those steady, quiet men who made a room calm just by standing in it.
I remembered the way he’d listened while my father sat at our kitchen table, turning his coffee mug in both hands and saying, as evenly as he could, “I’m not asking for special treatment. I just want my daughter left alone.”
“Hand-stitched pity?”
So when I heard his voice behind me at prom, I knew it before I turned.
“Mrs. Tilmot?”
She went still.
Officer Warren stood at the edge of the crowd in full uniform, with the assistant principal beside him, pale and furious.
Mrs. Tilmot tried for a smile. “Officer. Is there a problem?”
“Yes,” he said. “You need to step outside with me.”
“Is there a problem?”
Her chin lifted. “Over what? A harmless comment?”
The assistant principal cut in. “We warned you earlier to keep your distance from Sydney.”
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