There are true things and there are true things you choose to build a child on.

That was both.

Chapter 13 — The Alert

I will not pretend I was calm in the hours that followed.

My ex-wife was somewhere in the back of a fleeing man’s vehicle, hurt, and I was in a hospital, and every cell in my body wanted to be out on the roads myself, doing something, anything.

But I had a daughter in a hospital bed who had just lost her mother into thin air and could not lose her father too, not even for an afternoon, and I had a detective telling me the truest hard thing anyone told me that whole day.