“The best thing you can do for Elena,” Detective Vance said, “is stay exactly here, be a wall for that little girl, and let my people do the part they’re trained for.

If you go out there and get in the middle of it, you don’t help her.

You just give them one more person to worry about.” I hated it.

I hated it and I knew she was right, and being a grown man sometimes means doing the thing you hate because it is the thing that helps.

So I stayed.

I sat with Maya, and I held her hand, and I let the professionals work, and I have thought since that it was the hardest and maybe the best decision I made that whole day — to trust the system my daughter needed me to trust, instead of making myself one more problem on a dangerous road.