He checked first.

His eyes went to Chloe’s retreating back before they came to my face, and he waited until she was out of the room before he let himself reach for me, and in that single reflexive glance was the whole horror of what had been done to him.

My father had been a confident man my entire life — a man who filled a doorway, who had opinions and shared them, who had raised two children and buried a wife and run his own small business and never once, that I saw, been afraid in his own house.

And this thinned, shrunken version of him had learned, the way a beaten animal learns, to check whether it was permitted before he embraced his own child.