She needs the grown-up to become calm and solid and useful — a flat clear surface she can set the truth down on without it sliding off.

Cordell had watched, years earlier, a well-meaning officer lose a disclosure by reacting too big, too fast, scaring a child back into silence with the size of his own outrage on her behalf.

He had never forgotten it.

So he took the heat rising in his own chest — and it was considerable, it was the particular heat of a father hearing what this father had done — and he set it aside, deliberately, the way you set down a hot pan, to be dealt with later when it could not burn anyone who mattered.

What he gave Junia instead was the thing she needed: a steady man, crouched at her level, in no hurry, who acted as though there was nothing she could tell him that he could not hold.

He crouched a careful distance away — not looming, not crowding, his hands open and visible where both girls could see them.