feet, my toes curling against the floorboards. My hand hovered over the white-painted wood. Every fiber of my being screamed at me to turn around, to go back to bed, to pull the covers over my head and pretend I was deaf, dumb, and blind.
Instead, I pushed the door open just wide enough to peer inside.
The scene that met my eyes scrambled my brain for several seconds, refusing to resolve into a coherent image.
Evan was lying in Emma’s narrow twin bed. He wasn’t sitting on the edge, and he wasn’t kneeling to comfort a crying child. He was stretched out completely flat beneath the pink-and-white polka-dot duvet, sharing the mattress with my seven-year-old daughter. One of his heavy, muscular arms was slung tightly, possessively over her small shoulders, pinning her against his chest as if she were a weighted blanket.
His face was
