She was not dramatic.
She did not invent monsters, and she did not say outrageous things just to watch adults react.
When she spoke, she spoke with the calm certainty of weather.
That morning, buckled into the back seat with her pink backpack beside her, she told me a man walked into our bedroom after I fell asleep, that he moved slowly, and that her mother closed her eyes and said nothing.
She delivered it in the same voice she used when she asked for strawberries in her lunchbox.
I nearly jerked the car into the next lane.
I asked her to repeat it, hoping I had heard wrong, but she only looked out the window and said she had seen him more than once.
He came very late, she told me.
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