And my husband moved.

David stood up so fast his chair crashed over backward onto the hardwood floor, and he stepped, squarely and deliberately, into the space between my sister and our ten-year-old son, his broad frame blocking her path completely.

“Don’t you take another step toward my son, Gwen,” he said, and his voice had dropped into a low, dangerous register I rarely heard from my even-tempered husband.

And across the table, my daughter, who had been sobbing into her hand, went still.