Page 62 of Smitty

My chest tightened.

Dylan was a sweet kid with a big heart. I knew that the first time I met him. I had no doubt that he would be horrified by a threat like that, especially if it was against someone he cared about. My heart ached for him when I asked, “Did Dylan interpret Jimmy’s threat to include his parents?”

“Yes, he did.” Mark grimaced. “He referenced his mom and dad specifically… his little brother, too.”

“He’s ten.”

“Yes, I know.”

“He’s carried this around by himself for months.”

Every appointment. Every visit. Every drawing and conversation.

It all came to this.

He’d been trying to protect his parents, not hide from them. I leaned back in my seat. “I knew something wasn’t right.”

“You were right,” Lisa replied with a sympathetic smile. “You kept saying there was a missing piece, and this was it.”

Mark leaned forward. “I don’t believe Dylan thinks Jimmy is a bad kid… He actually felt sorry for him. Said he was sad.”

“Because of the father?”

“Yes. He said he yells at him all the time, and he was covered in bruises a couple times he saw him.”

Silence settled over us for a moment, then Lisa lowered her pen and said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. I will get with Daniel, and we will take things from there.”

“Daniel?”

Daniel was one of our senior case managers. He had twenty-plus years in child welfare, and if there was a difficult case, Daniel was usually the one they sent. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Lisa wanted to bring him in on this, but I had been working with Dylan and his family from the start. I wasn’t ready to just step aside, so I told her, “And what about me? What will I do?”

“You will step back… At least for the time being,” she responded firmly. “The information Dylan disclosed raises concerns about both child safety and access to a firearm in the home. This is a volatile situation. Daniel and I will conduct an immediate home visit with Jimmy and his father.”

“You will need to coordinate with law enforcement before any contact is made there,” Mark warned. “We don’t want anyone walking into something they aren’t prepared for.”

“Of course,” Lisa answered. “This isn’t the first time we’ve handled a case like this.”

“Well, it’s a first for me, and it’s a first for Dylan and his family.”

“I will reach out to them,” I offered.

“No,” Lisa snapped. “We will handle it from here.”

“But I’ve worked with this family from the beginning.”

“I’m fully aware of the work you’ve done.”

“I think Dylan would respond better if…”

“Brooke,” she cut me off. “You’ve done well by Dylan. But this isn’t about your relationship with him or his family. This is about maneuvering through a potential situation with a juvenile and a firearm, and experience matters.”

I hated that she was right, but she was.

I knew it when she added, “We don’t know what we’re walking into with this. This is a child’s account of events. We don’t know how skewed they might be. And I’m not putting one of my newer social workers in the middle of that, no matter how good they might be.”

“I understand.”

“You’ve done good work on this case, Brooke. You earned Dylan’s trust and got him to a counselor who actually got through to him. And because of that, you may have saved his life.”