I opened the door.
Lying on my welcome mat, curled into a fetal ball, was a woman. She was soaked to the bone, shivering violently in a thin silk nightgown. Her hair was matted with blood.
“Help me,” she whispered.
I knelt down. When she turned her face up to the porch light, my heart stopped for a single, terrifying second.
It was Lily. My daughter.
Her left eye was swollen shut, purple and bulbous. Her lip was split wide open. There were finger marks—bruises blooming like dark ink—around her throat.
“Lily,” I breathed, scooping her up. She weighed nothing. She felt fragile, like a bird with broken wings.
I carried her inside to the sofa. I grabbed the emergency medical kit from under the sink—not a store-bought plastic box, but a military-grade trauma pack I kept stocked out of habit.
I cleaned the blood from her forehead. My hands, usually rough from gardening, moved with the steady, surgical grace of a field medic. I checked her pupils. Concussion. I checked her ribs. Two broken.
