I don’t even know where to start with this, so I’m just going to say it straight out.

A coworker told me about a domestic violence shelter last Tuesday. We were eating lunch. She was talking about local nonprofits, grant money, things like that.

I was half listening, to be honest. I’m 68 years old. I’ve sat through a lot of lunch conversations.

Then she said the name.

“Have you heard of The Hallway? Over on the east side. They just got a million-dollar grant. Forty beds.”

I put my sandwich down.

She kept going. Said it was started by a young woman. Said the founder had quite a story. She pulled it up on her phone and slid it across the table to me.

I saw my daughter’s face.

I haven’t slept right since.

Let me back up. Because you need to know what kind of man I was in 2012, or none of this makes sense.

I was 54 then. I had worked thirty years in a machine shop. I had rules. I had standards. My daughter Renee was 19, and she came home one Sunday afternoon with a man I had never met, older than her by a few years, and something about him was just wrong from the first minute. I can’t even explain it exactly. His handshake was wrong. His eyes moved around too much. I pulled Renee into the kitchen and asked her flat out how long this had been going on.

“A few months,” she said.

“He’s got a record,” I told her. I hadn’t even looked him up yet. I just knew.

She got that look she used to get. Chin up. Jaw set. Her mother’s jaw, rest her soul.

I want to be honest here, because that’s the whole point of typing this out.

I didn’t handle what happened next with any kind of grace or patience or whatever a better father would have done.

I went back into the living room, grabbed that man by the collar of his jacket, and walked him down the hallway to the front door. Not rough enough to call it anything serious, I told myself. But rough enough that he knew. Rough enough that Renee saw it.

I opened the door and I said, “Don’t come back here.”

Then I turned to Renee and I said, “Pick better or don’t come back either.”

She looked at me for a long time. I thought she was going to cry. She didn’t.

She picked up her bag and she walked out behind him.

I told myself I had done the right thing. I told myself that for a long time, actually.