I had just enough time to really look at him. He had pretty hair. Shiny and chestnut brown and pulled back into a bun. There were tattoos creeping up his neck and his eyes were blue or green.

But my moment to observe him was over in a nanosecond when he sprang to his feet. I cocked the bat and stepped toward him, pulling back to swing. It’s muscle memory to swing a bat. My body knew exactly what to do. But halfway through the swing, my gut clenched and my arms went screwy. Because there wasn’t a ball at the other end of this swing. It was a person. Yes, a person who had trashed my house, but a person with a pulse and breath in his lungs, standing there in two boots that he’d tied himself before his left his house. A person whose eyes tracked the bat. Who pivoted his body halfway away from me and flinched. The flinch was what really did it. Dogs flinch when somebody is about to kick them. Little kids flinch when a basketball comes flying at their nose. Drivers flinch before a car crash. There was something so . . . heartbreaking about that flinch. He was flinching because of me. Because of the weapon in my hands. Because my two arms were swinging toward him. About to hit him with a baseball bat.

My swing froze midway. I made a sound. He looked up, one forearm protecting his face from me. But seeing me pause was all the time he needed. He reached to the waistband of his pants and something black and metallic flashed in his hand. A bag fell off his shoulder. He was wearing gloves I hadn’t noticed before.

There was a handgun six inches from my eyeballs. Staring me down with one cold eye. You idiot, that gun seemed to say to me. You couldn’t even swing a bat and now this guy is gonna pull a trigger.

But he didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he was standing in front of me and then he wasn’t. I heard my front door slam. I heard pounding steps on the hallway stairs. And then I was on the stairs, too. On spaghetti legs, in my boxer shorts, I stumbled my way down after him. Was I chasing him? No. Not really. Was I trying to get the hell out of my house? To get help? To get to another person who wouldn’t point a gun in my face? Maybe. Probably. Even now it’s hard to say.