Reasonable men do not break custody agreements over missed phone calls.

I had told myself for three days that I was being reasonable, and I had gotten in the truck anyway, because underneath the reasonable man was a father, and the father had known.

It was a nice house on a quiet street on the edge of the city, the kind of neighborhood where nothing is supposed to happen, and the moment I pulled up I knew I’d been right to come.

Julian’s SUV was in the driveway, so someone was home.

But every curtain in the place was drawn, all of them, on a bright Sunday morning, so the house looked shut, blinded, turned in on itself.

And a chain had been looped through the front gate and padlocked — a chain, on a suburban front gate, where before there had been nothing.