He calls the boys for dinner. Moments later, we sit at the kitchen table to eat. Will has served the pork chops with a side of spinach couscous tonight, his culinary skills easily trumping mine.

“Where’s Imogen?” I ask, and Will tells me she’s with a friend, studying for a Spanish quiz. She’ll be home by seven. I roll my eyes, mutter, “Don’t hold your breath.” Because Imogen rarely, if ever, does as she says. Only sometimes does she eat dinner with us. When she does, she saunters into the kitchen five minutes later than the rest of us because she can. Because we’re not going to nag her about it. She knows that if she wants to eat the dinner Will’s made, she eats with us, or she doesn’t eat at all. Though still, when she does eat with us, she comes late and leaves early to exercise her autonomy.

Tonight, however, she’s a no-show, and I wonder if she’s really studying with a friend, or if she’s doing something else, like hanging out at the abandoned military fortification at the far end of the island where kids have been rumored to drink, do drugs, have sex.

I put it out of my mind for now. Instead I ask Otto about his day. He shrugs and says, “Okay, I guess.”

Will asks, “How was the science test?” inquiring about things like static and kinetic friction, and asking him, “Did you remember what they mean?”

Otto says he did, he thinks. Will reaches over, ruffles his hair and says, “Atta boy. The studying helped.” I watch as a dark thatch of hair falls into Otto’s eyes. His hair has grown too long so that it’s shaggy and unkempt. It hides his eyes. Otto’s eyes are hazel like Will’s, and can turn on a dime from a warm brown to a sky blue, though I can’t see which tonight.

Dinner conversation consists mostly of Tate’s day at school, though half the class was apparently absent because half of the parents have the good sense not to send their children to school when there is a murderer on the loose. Though Tate doesn’t know this.

I watch as Otto, across from me, slices through the pork chop with a steak knife. There’s a crudeness about the way he holds the knife, about the way he cuts his meat with it. The pork is succulent. It’s cooked to perfection; my own knife slices right through. But still, Otto goes after his full tilt, as if it’s overcooked, tough and rubbery, nearly impossible to get through with the serrated knife edge, which it’s not.

There’s something about the knife in his hand that makes me lose my appetite.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Will asks, seeing that I’m not eating. I don’t answer his question. I reach for my fork instead. I set a bite of pork in my mouth. The memories come rushing back to me, and I find that I can hardly chew.

But still I do chew because Will is watching me, as is Tate. Tate, who doesn’t like pork chops, though we have a three-bite rule in our home. Three bites and then you can be through. He’s only had one.

But Otto, on the other hand, eats voraciously, sawing through the meat like a lumberjack with a log.

I’d never thought much about knives before. They were just part of the flatware. Not until the day Will and I walked into the principal’s office at Otto’s public high school in Chicago and there he sat in a chair, back to us, handcuffs on his wrists. It was alarming to see, my son with his hands bound behind him like a common criminal. Will had received a call from the principal that there was a problem at school, something we needed to discuss. I cut short my shift in the ER. As I drove to the school alone with plans to meet Will there, my mind went to a failing grade, or the overlooked signs of a learning disability we didn’t yet know about. Perhaps Otto was dyslexic. The idea of Otto struggling with something, with anything, saddened me. I wanted to help.

I walked straight past the police cruiser parked outside. I didn’t think anything of it.

But then, at the sight of Otto there in the chair in handcuffs, the mama bear in me reared up at once. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in my entire life. Take those off of him this minute, I demanded. You have no right, I said, but whether the police officer did or didn’t, I didn’t know. He stood just feet shy of Otto, looking down on the boy whose eyes sat glued to the floor, head slumped forward, arms awkwardly tethered together behind him so that he couldn’t sit all the way back. Otto looked so small in the chair. Helpless and frail. At fourteen, he had yet to experience the same growth spurt that other boys his age already had. He stood a head shorter than most of them, and twice as thin. Though Will and I were right there with him, he was alone. Completely alone. Anyone could see that. It made my heart break for him.

The school principal sat on the other side of a large desk, looking grim.

Mr. and Mrs. Foust, he said, rising to his feet and extending a hand in greeting, a hand which Will and I both ignored.

Doctor, I amended. The police officer smirked.

The evidence bag on the corner of the principal’s desk, I soon learned, contained a knife. And not just any knife, but an eight-inch chef’s knife from Will’s prized set, stolen that morning from the block of them that sat on the corner of the kitchen counter.

The principal explained to Will and me that Otto brought the knife to school, hidden in his backpack. Fortunately, the principal said, one of the students saw and had the good sense to inform a teacher and the local police were called in to apprehend Otto before any damage could be done.

As the principal spoke, I could think only one thing. How humiliating it would have been for Otto to be handcuffed in front of his peers. To be removed from his classroom by the local police. Because never once did I think it was possible that Otto brought a knife to school or that he threatened children with it. This was a mistake only. A horrible mistake for which Will and I would seek retribution for our son and his marred reputation.

Otto was quiet, kind. Not ostentatiously happy, but happy. He had friends, a handful only, but friends nonetheless. He was always very rule-abiding, never once getting into trouble at school. There had never been a detention, a note sent home, a phone call with a teacher. There was no need for any of these things. And so, I easily reasoned, there was no way Otto had done something as delinquent as bring a knife to school.