The doctor stepped between him and the doorway.
“I need to know something,” he said to me. “Is Emily safe if he comes in?”
Before I could answer, Emily screamed from inside the exam room.
“Don’t let him in! He knows why it hurts!”
For the first time in fifteen years, Michael’s confidence drained out of his face like water.
The doctor did not move.
Michael tried to step around him anyway.
The doctor put one arm against the doorframe and blocked him.
“Sir,” he said, “you need to stay right where you are.”
Michael looked at me then.
Not at Emily.
Me.
It was the same look he had used in our kitchen, our bedroom, our driveway, the school parking lot, everywhere he had trained me to understand consequences without him having to name them.
But this time he made the mistake of doing it in front of witnesses.
