Then a pause.
“And find out where that card went. The kid’s lying to me. I can tell.”
The video ended on Eli’s face, close to the lens, saying nothing, just looking at me.
Angela watched it twice without speaking.
I watched my son’s face at the end of it.
He was not cr*ing.
He had the look he gets when a math problem is hard and he has decided to finish it anyway, and I understood that somewhere over the Atlantic, my eight-year-old had stopped being a child who was taken and become a witness who was waiting.
I don’t know when he learned that.
I think it was on a Wednesday, from a woman who sat with him over library books and told nobody.
Then she said, “Laura, that is not a custody case anymore. That’s a man telling a lawyer he intends to keep a child outside the country in violation of a court order, and use the child to st*al from the child. I’m filing this tonight.”
