Feel the weight of what I did tonight settling into my bones next to all the other weights I carry—fatherhood, brotherhood, the coin, the fire I wasn't part of but carry anyway because it made the woman in my arms who she is.
I did terrible things tonight. Necessary things. Things I won't regret, won't forget, and won't pretend didn't change me.
But my girls are sleeping down the hall. And the woman I love is breathing in my arms. And the men who hurt them are never going to hurt anyone again.
That's the deal. That's the cost. You love something hard enough, you'll do anything to protect it.
Even the things that make you someone you don't recognize in the mirror.
I'll look in the mirror tomorrow.
Tonight, I just need to hold her.
Morning comes the way mornings do after a rough night.
Too bright, too ordinary, too convinced that the world is the same as it was yesterday.
It's not, but the girls don't need to know that.
I make breakfast.
Eggs—the good kind, not the burned kind. Toast. Sliced apples for Sadie Jo. Milk for Wrenleigh that she'll complain about and drink anyway.
The rhythm of it steadies me. The routine.
The memory of a decade of mornings that starts with cracking eggs and ends with packed lunches, and in between, the specific miracle of two girls who trust me enough to come downstairs and eat.
Wrenleigh appears first.
She stops in the kitchen doorway and looks at me—really looks, the way she's been looking at everything since last night—and whatever she sees on my face must be enough, because she sits down and picks up her fork.
"The eggs are better today," she says.
"I've been practicing."
Sadie Jo comes down a few minutes later. Slower. Quieter.
She's wearing a long-sleeved shirt that covers the bruises, and the fact that she chose that shirt. That my thirteen-year-old daughter is already hiding what was done to her, puts a crack in my chest that breakfast can't fix.
But she sits. She eats. She looks at me across the table and says, "Dad?"
"Yeah, baby."
"Is it over?"
I look at my daughter. My dark-haired girl. My mirror. Blue-gray eyes that see too much, that have seen too much, that will carry the memory of last night long after the bruises fade.
"It's over," I say. "It's done. Nobody's coming back."
She holds my gaze for a few moments. Testing the words. Measuring them against everything she knows about me—that I don't lie, that I don't make promises I can't keep, that when I say something is done, it's done.
"Okay," she says.
She picks up her fork and starts eating, and the sound of my daughters having breakfast in my kitchen on a Saturday morning.
Forks on plates, Wrenleigh complaining about the milk, Sadie Jo's music playing low from her phone, is the most sacred sound in the world.
Leah comes in last.
