I thought about driving away. I want to admit that. I thought about it. I thought about how I was a thirty-eight-year-old white man in a parking lot, and I was about to do something that involved the police, and I was about to do it to a woman I did not know, in a situation I did not fully understand, and that she might be having the worst day of her life and I was about to make it infinitely worse. I thought about my own mother, who had been a single mom, and who had occasionally lost her patience with me in public in ways that would, now, probably look alarming to a stranger in a parking lot. I thought about the

possibility that I had misread the welt on the boy's face — that it was a scrape from falling at daycare, that the mom's hand swing had been a gesture not a strike, that the whole thing was something other than what my gut was telling me. And then I thought about the kid's face. The look. The way he did not flinch. The way he had already learned, at three years old, to accept a hit without reacting. I pulled my phone out. I did not call 911. I called the Dallas non-emergency line. I told them what I had seen. I gave them the license plate.