Every instinct I had was wrong that afternoon, and I mean that as a kind of hard-won wisdom.

Everything my body wanted to do — grab my keys, get on the interstate, find that vehicle myself, be the one who kicked in the door — every bit of that was the movie version, the version where the father’s rage is a superpower and the man who loves the most gets to be the hero.

And it is a lie.

In the real world, an untrained furious man inserting himself into a police operation gets people killed, and one of the people he most often gets killed is the person he’s trying to save.

The most loving thing I could do for Elena, in the actual world and not the movie in my head, was the thing that felt like cowardice and was in fact its opposite: to sit still.

To be a wall for my daughter.