That one sentence changed the whole room.

Chapter 3 — Without Anyone’s Words

Cordell had two daughters of his own, grown now, and something in the way Junia planted herself between him and her twin reached straight past twenty years of training and took hold of him.

But training was exactly what the girls needed from him now, more than feeling, so he made himself slow down.

He had learned that discipline the hard way, over a career of front-counter moments that had taught him the single most important thing about being the adult a frightened child finally reaches: that your feelings, however large and however righteous, are not the point, and that indulging them can cost the child the very thing they came for.

A child who has worked up the courage to tell does not need to then manage a grown-up’s shock or fury on top of everything else.