SAFE HANDS

Jack's hands close around his mother's wrists.

Not gently. Not the careful, de-escalating grip of someone trained for exactly this moment. A hard, sudden yank that spins Diane half around and sends her stumbling backward into the dark wood of the kitchen cabinets.

The bat clatters from her hand, rolling once, coming to rest against the baseboard.

"GET BACK," Jack roars, and it is genuinely, actually frightening, this voice, filling every corner of the kitchen the way Diane's fury filled it thirty seconds earlier, an entirely different register of the same terrible key. "Don't you EVER touch them. Do you understand me? EVER."

Diane, winded, one hand against the cabinet to steady herself, stares at her son like she's seeing something for the first time.

"Jack—"

"Get OUT."

She doesn't move immediately. There is a long, strange moment where the whole kitchen seems to hold its breath — glass glittering across the tile, apples still rolling to gentle stops in the corners, three people frozen in the wreckage of a wedding-gift vase.

Then Diane straightens, smooths her mustard-yellow blouse with hands that are visibly shaking now, and walks toward the door without another word.

She does not look back at Emma. She does not look at Ruby at all.

The door closes behind her with a soft click, absurdly gentle after everything that came before it.

---

Jack turns.

For one moment — just one — Emma sees the man she married. Kneeling fast, dropping to the tile heedless of the broken glass, arms opening wide enough to gather both of them in at once, Emma and Ruby together, folding them against his chest like something precious rescued from a fire.

"I've got you," he says, voice cracking now, all the roar gone out of it. "I've got you both. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I wasn't here sooner."

Ruby is crying now, finally, the delayed reaction of a six-year-old whose body needed the danger to fully pass before it would let the tears through. She presses her face into her father's shoulder, small fists still wrapped around Bun-Bun's ragged ear.

Emma lets herself lean in too. Just for a second. Just for one breath.

His heartbeat is fast under her cheek. His shirt smells like the outside air, like grocery store plastic bags, like the ordinary Tuesday this was supposed to be before it wasn't.

"She's getting worse," Emma whispers into his shoulder. "Jack, she can't keep doing this. Not around Ruby. We have to—"

She lifts her head to finish the sentence, to look at him while she says the hard thing, the thing she's been afraid to say out loud for months.