“Do you remember,” my husband began slowly, “how our son started waking up at night about a month ago, saying someone was in his room?” I did remember. I had chalked it up to nightmares, to an active imagination, to the shadows a five-year-old, now six, turns into monsters. My husband’s voice dropped even lower. “He told me he kept seeing a man standing at the foot of his bed. I didn’t want to scare you, so I handled it my own way. I told him the forks would keep him safe. That if he lined them up under the mattress, nothing could reach him. It was supposed to be a comfort. A game to make the fear go away.”

I felt my shoulders loosen, just slightly, because that was a strange but harmless explanation. Then he kept talking, and the relief died in my chest. “But last week he told me something new,” my husband said. “He said the man wasn’t a dream. He said the man comes in through the window when the forks aren’t there. And the night I forgot to check them, before I left, our neighbor’s security camera caught someone crossing our backyard at three in the morning.” My eyes snapped to the hallway, to the window at the end of it, and every hair on my body stood up. “That’s why I said don’t move the forks,” he whispered. “Not because they work. Because I need him to feel safe until I get home tomorrow, and because I already called the police.”