am not inserting myself anywhere.

Open the door.

For a second, she just stared at me.

I think she was looking for hesitation and couldn’t find it.

Then, with a disgusted sound in the back of her throat, she slid the chain free and stepped just far enough aside for me to enter.

The house smelled like stale coffee, lemon cleaner, and sweat.

It was the smell of people who had been up all night trying to erase something.

I crossed the foyer and walked into the living room.

Mark stood near the fireplace in a wrinkled T-shirt and expensive lounge pants, both hands shoved so deeply into his pockets that his shoulders curled forward.

He wasn’t drunk.

He wasn’t furious.

He was pale.

He kept staring at the rug instead of at me, as if eye contact might force him to become a witness in his own house.

Then I saw Emily.

She was on the floor in the narrow wedge of space between the sofa and the wall, her knees pulled to her chest, her head tucked down, her whole body folded inward in a posture I had only ever seen in shelter dogs and terrified children.

When I said her name, she lifted her face.

Everything inside me stopped.

Her left eye was swollen nearly shut.

Her lip was split.

One side of her cheek had the dark, rising bloom of a bruise under pale skin.

But it was her expression that broke something in me.

She looked like a person who had been trapped so long she no longer trusted rescue.

Dad, she whispered.

I dropped to my knees in front of her so fast my right knee cracked against the hardwood.

I didn’t feel it.

I reached for her slowly, the way you reach for someone who has learned to flinch first and ask questions later.

Baby, I’m here, I said.

I’ve got you.

You’re leaving with me.

Her fingers clamped around my sleeve so hard they shook.

Linda came into the room behind me with Robert at her shoulder.

Robert Wilson was taller than his wife and broader, with a soft middle and the kind of red, puffy face that suggested expensive whiskey and bad character.

He crossed his arms over his robe and planted himself like a man preparing to be unreasonable for hours.

She fell, Linda announced.

The lie was so smooth it had rehearsal behind it.

She was hysterical.

Throwing things.

Yelling at Mark for no reason.

She tripped over the edge of the rug and hit the table.

We’ve been trying to calm her down for hours.

I didn’t look at Linda.

I kept my eyes on Mark.

Did she fall, Mark.

He swallowed.

His throat bobbed once.

Still he didn’t answer.

Emily’s grip tightened on me until her nails bit through my shirt.

I asked again, slower this time.

Did.

She.

Fall.

Mark finally looked up, and the first thing out of his mouth wasn’t yes.

She shouldn’t have been in my office, he said.

Emily made a small sound in the back of her throat and curled tighter into herself.

That sound told me more than words.

People don’t recoil from the truth.

They recoil from the hand that taught them what follows it.

I looked down and