“Those are fingerprints,” he said, his voice breaking. “Someone grabbed her hard.”
He pressed the phone to his ear. The dispatcher answered, and as David started frantically whispering our address and explaining the situation, we suddenly heard a loud, urgent knock at our front door.
My heart hammered against my ribs.

I scrambled to pull Lily’s sleeper back down to cover her legs, my hands fumbling with the tiny buttons. David froze, holding the phone against his chest.

“Police are on the way,” he mouthed to me.
The knock came again, harder this time. I walked over to the door, my legs feeling like they were made of lead, and looked through the peephole.
It was Jennifer.

She was standing on our front porch, shifting her weight anxiously from foot to foot, looking over her shoulder toward the driveway. I unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open just a crack.
“Hey,” she said, her voice tight. “I forgot to pack Lily’s special formula in the bag. Mark realized it when I got home. He… he was really mad that I forgot it.”

Mark was her boyfriend of eight months. He wasn’t Lily’s father, but he had moved in with Jennifer shortly after Lily was born. We had never really warmed up to him. He was always perfectly polite to us, but there was a rigid, controlling energy about him that put me on edge.
“Jen,” I said, stepping out onto the porch and closing the door slightly behind me to block her view of the living room. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said quickly, avoiding eye contact. “Can I just grab the bottles? Mark is waiting in the car at the end of the street. He didn’t want to pull into the driveway.”
I felt a cold sweat break out on the back of my neck.

I looked past her and saw Mark’s dark sedan idling down by the stop sign. He wasn’t looking at the house, but I could see his silhouette through the tinted glass.
“Jen, you need to come inside,” I said softly, grabbing her wrist.

When my fingers wrapped around her arm, she flinched violently and pulled away. The sleeve of her heavy oversized sweater slipped up just an inch, but it was enough. I saw the edge of a dark, mottled bruise on her forearm.
“Jennifer,” I breathed out, the horrific reality of the entire situation crashing down on me all at once. “What is he doing to you? What is he doing to Lily?”