I didn’t answer him.
Not because I wasn’t afraid.
I was.
Any man who says he isn’t afraid when he walks into a house at two in the morning and finds his daughter on the floor with blood on her mouth is either a fool or a liar.
My hands were shaking.
My knees felt hollow.
But somewhere beneath all that fear, there was something steadier.
A father’s anger.
A grandfather’s purpose.
And the clear, simple knowledge that Emily and Ethan were not spending another minute in that house.
Jason still had his hand clamped around Emily’s arm. She was trying not to cry, trying not to look weak, trying not to make things worse. I knew that look. I had seen it before, years earlier, on my own wife’s face when she was sick and pretending she wasn’t in pain.
Ethan crouched beneath the kitchen table, his little hands pressed over his ears.
“Let her go,” I said.
Jason smiled at me like I had told a joke.
“You don’t come into my house and give orders.”
“This stopped being your house the second my grandson called me begging for help.”
His smile twitched.
For one second, I saw something pass through his face.
Not guilt.
Not regret.
Fear.
It was quick, but it was there.
And that surprised me.
Jason wasn’t afraid of me physically. I was sixty-eight years old. I had bad knees, a stiff shoulder from an old construction injury, and a heart doctor who kept reminding me to take my walks seriously. Jason was younger, bigger, and angrier.
So what was he afraid of?
Emily seemed to notice it too. Her eyes moved from him to me, and something changed in her expression. Some small piece of her that had been buried under years of fear flickered awake.
“Jason,” she whispered. “Please. Let Ethan go.”
