I have spent my career keeping my face composed in front of frightened children, keeping my own fear and anger off my features so that a child in crisis has one calm face to look at.

I called on every bit of that training now, because Lucas needed his mother to be steady, not to see the rage that was rising in me like ice water filling a room.

But underneath the steadiness, something was hardening into a shape I did not yet have a name for, a cold and total resolve.

I know the name for it now.

It was the particular resolve of a parent who has understood that they are the last line, that no one else is coming, that the systems and the family and the assumptions of safety have all failed and there is only them, standing between their child and the people who would harm him.