Something snaps inside me.
A load-bearing wall that's been holding everything up for ten years, and one of the bricks just cracked.
"One of them grabbed her and said, 'Tell your daddy he's out of time.'" Leah's voice finally breaks on the last word.
Not a crack—a fracture.
The same sound Wrenleigh's voice made when she talked about standing at the window at five years old. "She's thirteen, Coin. He grabbed a thirteen-year-old girl and?—"
"I'm going upstairs."
I take the stairs two at a time.
Wrenleigh's door is closed. Sadie Jo's is closed.
Both locked—I can hear the deadbolts from the hallway.
Smart girls. Brave girls. My girls.
I knock on Wrenleigh's door first. "Wren. It's Dad. Open the door."
The lock clicks. The door opens. And my daughter—my fierce, furious, combustible daughter—is standing there with a baseball bat in her hands and tears on her face and a look in her blue eyes that I've never seen before.
Not fear. Not anger.
Something beyond both.
Something forged in the last fifteen minutes that will never fully leave her.
The look of a girl who just watched her home get invaded and chose to fight instead of hide.
"I called you," she says. Her voice is raw. "I called you and then I called 911 and then I put Sadie Jo in her room and locked it and I came back downstairs with this—" She lifts the bat. "And Leah was already—she was already between them and the hallway. She wouldn't let them past her. She kept saying 'You want to send a message, send it through me,' and they—Dad, they hit her. They hit her and she didn't move. She just stood there and took it and she wouldn't let them get to us."
My vision blurs.
Not tears—something unique. Something deeper than tears, something that lives in the marrow of my bones.
"Are you hurt?" I ask.
"No. They didn't touch me. They didn't get past Leah." She swallows. "But Sadie Jo?—"
"I know."
"One of them grabbed her before Leah could?—"
"I know, baby. I'm going to check on her."
Wrenleigh nods. The bat doesn't lower.
I don't tell her to put it down because right now my sixteen-year-old daughter holding a baseball bat in her doorway is the sanest response anyone in this house has had tonight.
I go to Sadie Jo's door. Knock gently. "Sadie Jo. Baby, it's Dad. You're safe. Open the door."
Silence, then the lock clicks. The door opens a few inches.
One blue-gray eye looks out at me from the gap, and the sight of it…
My daughter's eye, swollen with tears, peeking out from behind a locked door in her own home—is the thing that finally breaks me.
