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The question came out too sharply. I hated myself for it, but fear had already begun to crawl beneath my skin.

“That you could stop them? By yourself?”

“I thought I could take it to someone who would.”

“You just told me not to trust the police.”

“I learned that too late.”

He looked exhausted. Hollowed out. Weeks of terror sat in the lines around his mouth, and I suddenly saw every warning I had ignored. Every time he had lost his place in conversation. Every meal he had barely touched. Every night I heard him walking the hallway long after midnight.

He had been carrying this alone. I had called him paranoid.

“You need to leave, Adriana. Go far from here and…”

“What?”

“Tonight.”

My heart began to beat harder.

“Where would I go?”

“Anywhere far from here.”

“If I leave, you’re coming with me.”

“No.”

I rose again. “I’m not leaving you here.”

He lifted the folder and held it against his chest.

“You have to.”

“No.”

“Adriana.”

“No.”

He crossed the kitchen and caught my face between his hands. The gesture broke something inside me. He had held me that way when I was small. When I had fallen from my bicycle and split my chin open. When my mother died and I woke from nightmares, unable to remember that she was gone until I called for her.

His thumbs rested against my cheeks. His eyes were wet.

“I need you to listen to me now.”

“I am listening.”

My throat closed.

His face tightened. A tear slipped from one of his eyes. I had seen my father cry twice. At my mother’s funeral. And when he found me alive after I wandered away at a crowded festival when I was six.

Never for himself. Not until that night.

“I have made mistakes,” he whispered. “So many mistakes.”

“Then we fix them.”