Honestly.
“Then she can be mad at me.”
Tommy cried harder, but his body stopped fighting her.
Clara placed a folded towel beneath his arm.
She worked slowly along the edge, using pressure rather than speed.
The first sound was a tiny scrape.
Then a dull crack.
Tommy sucked in a breath so sharp it made Clara freeze.
“Do you want me to stop?”
He shook his head.
“Please don’t.”
So she kept going.
A piece of plaster flaked off and landed beside his sandwich.
The kitchen light caught the dust in the air.
The refrigerator hummed.
Outside, a car passed, splashing through the wet street.
Inside, Clara pressed again, and the cast split with a dry snap that seemed too loud for such a small room.
Tommy’s good hand gripped the edge of the chair until his knuckles whitened.
Clara lifted the loosened edge.
She had expected redness.
Maybe swelling.
Maybe irritation from the plaster rubbing too hard.
What she saw made her face change so completely that Tommy noticed before he looked down.
“What?” he whispered.
Clara did not answer right away.
The skin beneath the cast was not the harmless pink Patricia had imagined.
There were deep pressure marks where the cast had been far too tight.
There was angry swelling around the area Tommy had been pointing to for days.
The tissue looked trapped, hot, and wrong in a way no adult in that house should have dismissed.
There was no gore.
There was no movie-style horror.
There was something worse for a parent to understand.
Proof.
Plain, visible proof that the child had been telling the truth.
At that exact moment, headlights washed across the front window.
Patricia and Andrew were home.
Clara did not lower the cast.
She did not hide the broken plaster.
She did not scramble to explain before being accused.
She stood beside Tommy with one hand still near his arm and the other resting on the urgent care discharge paper.
The front door opened.
Patricia came in first, laughing at something Andrew had said in the driveway.
She still had her purse on her shoulder.
She still smelled faintly of restaurant coffee and rain.
Then she saw the table.
The broken cast.
The butter knife.
The dust.
Tommy crying into his shoulder.
Clara standing between him and the door.
“What did you do?” Patricia said.
It came out sharp, because fear often wears anger when it enters a room too fast.
Andrew stepped in behind her.
His keys were still in his hand.
“You broke his cast?”
Clara’s voice stayed low.
“I called you twice. I called Andrew once. I documented the swelling and the pain before I touched anything.”
