Here is the part I want you to understand, because I think it is the part that made the news local and then made the news slightly-not-local. Two weeks after the parking lot, a neighbor of Chelsea's — a woman who had not witnessed the incident but had been, she said, worried about the child for months — reached out to me through a friend of a friend and asked if I would be willing to speak at a custody hearing. Chelsea's estranged husband, the father of the boy, was seeking emergency sole custody, and the incident I had witnessed was going to be the centerpiece of his motion. The neighbor said she was telling me

this as a courtesy — I might get subpoenaed. She was also telling me, very carefully, that Chelsea was not "a monster." She was a twenty-nine-year-old woman going through the ugliest divorce the neighbor had ever seen, a woman who had been, herself, hit by the father of this child three years earlier in a different parking lot, and who had — this was what the neighbor wanted me to know — been trying to get clean from prescription medications that she had been prescribed after that incident. The neighbor said Chelsea was not a safe parent. She also said Chelsea was not an evil woman. She asked me if those two things could be true at the same time.