Around noon, my phone rang with a number I didn’t know.
“Hi, this is Karen from Greta’s summer camp. She’s safe, but I need you to come in as soon as you can.”
“What happened?”
A pause. I hate pauses. In my line of work, pauses are where the bad news lives.
“I think you need to come here,” Karen said. “It’s about the man who brought her.”
“I need you to come in as soon as you can.”
“Owen?” I actually almost laughed. “There has to be a mistake. He’s one of my closest friends.”
“I think you should come,” she said quietly.
My hands went cold.
Owen? Sweet, dependable Owen, who cried at Greta’s school play? What could he possibly have done?
I drove to that camp with my mind running every awful scenario, and I’m not proud of how fast it went there.
“There has to be a mistake. He’s one of my closest friends.”
Karen met me outside the main building.
She was a tall woman with a lanyard and the careful, flat face of someone who handles hard conversations for a living.
She didn’t make small talk. She walked me down a hallway and opened her office door.
I’d braced myself for a lot of things. I had not braced for this.
She walked me down a hallway and opened her office door.
Owen sat in a plastic chair beside Greta.
Her eyes were red and swollen. Her glasses were pushed up on her forehead, and she was twisting the hem of her shirt into a rope.
Owen looked like a man who’d swallowed a stone. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Greta?” I dropped to my knees in front of her. “Baby, what happened? Are you hurt?”
She shook her head and stared at the carpet.
“Baby, what happened? Are you hurt?”
I stood up. “Somebody tell me what’s going on.”
Karen closed the door. “I’ll be direct, Ma’am. This morning, Owen asked my staff to keep Greta away from several specific girls. He showed me screenshots that suggest she’s been bullied by them and asked us to change her cabin assignment.”
“Bullied?” The word didn’t fit in my mouth. “By who? Since when?”
“Here’s what concerned me,” Karen went on. “When I asked if you knew, he told me you didn’t. And he asked me not to call you yet.”
“Somebody tell me what’s going on.”
The room went very quiet.
I turned to Owen. “What bullying?”
He rubbed his jaw. “After you left, Greta told me she didn’t want to go. I asked why, and it took a while, but she finally told me. A group of girls from school have been going after her for weeks. They’re all signed up for this camp.”
“Weeks,” I repeated.
“She showed me their messages.” His voice was rough. “They told her nobody would want her in their cabin. They said it would be the same at camp, except she couldn’t get away from them.”
“They’re all signed up for this camp.”
