The sound of the slap was the first thing Ryan Carter remembered later, even before the blood, even before the flashing lights outside the windows, even before the way his wife’s family looked away.
It was not cinematic.
It was not loud in the way people expect violence to be loud.
It was sharp, flat, and horribly clean, followed by the scrape of chair legs across tile and the small, sickening thud of a child hitting the floor.
Lily had been sitting beside him at Claudia Whitmore’s dining table with her napkin folded neatly across her knees.
Ten years old, small for her age, with freckles over her nose and a gap in her smile she still loved because her dentist had told her it meant her grown-up teeth were coming in brave.
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