“Leo,” David said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Did a car hit you? Did you fall?”
Leo shook his head frantically, wincing as the movement jarred his leg. He grabbed David’s shirt, pulling him close, whispering as if he were afraid of being overheard even here, three blocks away.
“I had to jump, Dad,” Leo choked out. “I had to jump out the window.”
David froze. “What window?”
“The storage room,” Leo whispered. “The one in the attic.”
The storage room was on the third floor. A twenty-foot drop to the side garden.
“Why, Leo? Why would you do that?”
“Uncle Ted,” Leo cried, fresh tears spilling over. “He was hurting me. He dragged me upstairs. He said I was ruining it. He shoved me in the dark.”
David’s blood turned to ice. Ted. His best friend of twenty years. The man he played golf with every Sunday. The man who was currently at the house, supposedly “fixing the mesh WiFi network” while David was at work.
“He took a chair,” Leo continued, his voice rising in a panic attack. “I heard him, Dad. He wedged it under the doorknob outside. He trapped me! He yelled through the door… he said if I made one more sound, he would come back and ‘finish it.’ It was dark… I couldn’t breathe… I had to get out.”
David looked toward the direction of his house. He imagined the trajectory. A terrified ten-year-old boy, locked in a pitch-black room by a man he trusted, forcing himself to open a window and leap twenty feet into the bushes to escape a threat of murder.
This wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t a prank.
This was False Imprisonment. This was Aggravated Child Abuse. This was a structural failure of his entire life.
