Theo Vance sat fifteen feet away from me for eleven minutes.
And rather than walk four rows back and say honey, what’s going on, I leaned behind me and questioned two sixteen-year-olds about whether something had happened between my son and his best friend.
Four rows. Eleven minutes. That’s all it would have taken, and I’d have known everything, and that boy would not have had to stand at a microphone and announce to a hundred and forty-one people that half of them wanted him gone.
Two: I looked directly at a frightened child and decided the fear was guilt.
He had his hands locked together so hard his knuckles were white. I saw it. I registered it. And my brain took that data and produced he knows he’s done something.
That is what grief does, and it is also what I did, and both of those are true. Grief is an explanation. It is not a defense.
