“Daddy… Mommy’s boyfriend hit me with a baseball bat. He said if I cry, it’ll hurt more…”

—Yes, champ—I replied quickly, with an urgency that almost choked me—. I’m coming. I’m very close.

Marcus said nothing for a few seconds, and that silence had a strange weight, different from the previous one.

It was not an absence of sound, but the presence of something that had not yet been said.

“We are not alone,” he finally added.

The traffic around me ceased to exist for an instant; everything was reduced to those three words.