I had gotten good at that part.

Maybe too good. I had learned to stand guard so completely that I sometimes forgot the difference between a threat and a stranger.

And Sarge Ransom did not belong in a room built out of fragile things.

I heard him before I fully saw him — the door, and then a tread heavier than the ones I was used to, boots instead of the soft-soled shoes we all wore.

When I turned, he filled the doorway. Not figuratively. His shoulders came close to touching the frame on both sides, and he had to duck his head a fraction to come through, the way tall men learn to do without thinking.

He stood just inside the threshold and went very still, and his eyes moved across the room in a slow, methodical sweep — not the nervous glance of a visitor unsure where to stand, but something more deliberate, a man cataloguing exits and angles, reading a space for threats it did not contain.

He was in his early fifties, I guessed, though it was hard to be sure; his face had the weathered look of someone who had spent a lot of years outdoors in hard places.

Six-foot-four, easily. He wore a faded olive tactical jacket over a plain black shirt, and he held himself with a rigid, watchful stillness that made the sterile white walls around him look somehow flimsy, as if at any moment he expected them to come apart and reveal something worse behind them.

I want to be honest about what I felt, because I am not proud of it. What I felt was fear.

Not of him, exactly. Of what he might do without meaning to. In a room where I spend my days protecting two-pound children from the pressure of a careless hand, every part of me read this enormous, coiled, haunted-looking man as a hazard I had not signed off on.

Chapter 2 — His Hands

It was not his size that set off the alarm, though. I have handled big fathers before, big grandfathers, men who fold themselves down small and go soft and clumsy-tender over their children. Size I know how to manage. It was his hands.

They were enormous, and they were covered — the backs, the knuckles, running up into the forearms and disappearing under his rolled sleeves — in thick, glossy scar tissue.