The relief and the new terror existed in me at the exact same instant, layered, neither canceling the other, and I have since learned that this is simply what it is to love people in a dangerous situation: you do not get clean single feelings.

You get all of them at once, relief and dread and love and rage braided together so tightly you cannot pull one thread loose from the rest.

I stood in that hallway holding all of it, and then I did the only thing there was to do.

I asked the detective what came next, and I listened to the answer, and I got ready to do my part of it — which, it would turn out, was the hardest part of all: to wait.

“Then where is she,” I said.

“My daughter told me her mother tried to stop him.