Daniel walked toward the playground with a steadiness he didn’t feel.
The afternoon sun sat low enough to cast long shadows from the swing set, stretching them across the rubber ground like silent witnesses. Children laughed, shoes kicked up in tiny storms of sand near the slide, and somewhere a mother called a name with gentle impatience—but the normalcy of it all felt like a thin curtain drawn over something sharp.
Isabella stood by the swings, not climbing into one yet. She just… waited. Her small hands clutched the chain of the nearest swing as if it was an anchor, her shoulders hunched in a way that didn’t belong to her age.
Daniel’s chest tightened.
He’d seen her cry before—scraped knees, nightmares, a lost stuffed rabbit—but this was different. This was fear shaped into words sh
