I didn’t wait for Kayla. I put the Buick in drive and navigated the icy streets, the salt spray hitting my windshield. When I pulled up to the little house with the chain-link fence, Travis’s rusty pickup truck was in the driveway.

Beside it was an old green sedan with temporary tags. Marcus’s car.

My hands were steady now. The panic had burned off, leaving nothing but a hard, protective fury.

I walked up the porch steps. I didn’t knock. I had a spare key Kayla had given me three years ago for emergencies. I slid it into the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open.

Travis was sitting on the sofa, a half-empty can of beer on the coffee table. He looked up, his eyes widening in surprise, then narrowing into that lazy sneer I had always hated. “Janice? What are you doing here? Kayla’s not home.”

From the hallway near the bedrooms, a second man stepped out. He was wearing a grey sweatshirt, his face pale and sunken. Marcus.

“Who’s this?” Marcus asked, looking at Travis with a sudden, nervous twitch in his shoulder.

“Get out of my daughter’s house,” I said. I didn’t raise my voice. I stood in the doorway, holding the door open with my shoulder, letting the freezing Ohio wind blow into their warm living room.

“Janice, you need to calm down,” Travis said, standing up from the couch. He took a step toward me, trying to look big, trying to look like the man of the house. “You don’t just walk into our place like this.”

“The police are already at the end of the street, Travis,” I said. I pointed to the driveway. “I gave them Marcus’s name. I told them he’s been staying here. I told them about the game.”

Marcus’s face went completely white. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t look at his brother. He grabbed his jacket from the back of the kitchen chair and bolted toward the back door. But he didn’t make it. The blue lights were already flashing against the snowy windows, casting a strobing glare across the living room walls.

Two officers met Marcus at the back porch. I watched through the kitchen window as they put him in handcuffs against the hood of his green sedan. He didn’t fight. He just stared at the snowy ground.

Travis was arrested too, charged with child endangerment and conspiracy to violate parole conditions. He kept screaming that he didn’t do anything wrong, that he was just trying to help his brother get on his feet.

Kayla arrived twenty minutes later. She ran from her car, her hospital scrubs covered in wet snow, and threw her arms around me. She cried until her chest heaved, looking at the empty house, looking at the police cars, realizing how close she had come to losing everything.

That was four months ago.