He shouted for the kids to get away from their windows while sprinting toward the door. Imani watched through chair legs as he stood guard, his hands in fists and his right foot extended forward.

Outside, a car engine roared. The squeal of tires followed it along with footsteps. The latter noise was the most frightening to Imani. Their assailant was coming, she thought. He would be armed while her husband had only his bare knuckles.

She crawled toward the pushed-out chair that she’d previously occupied. Her phone was atop the table. If she could get to it, Imani thought, then the police would come. Their assailant would be arrested.

“Stay where you are!”

Philip’s instruction rang out as loud as the earlier bang. Imani reacted to his volume in the same way she’d responded to the seeming gunshot, dropping her stomach back down to the floor. “My phone is up there,” she explained. “I—”

“Don’t call the police.”

Imani didn’t understand the negative. Their circumstances were the exact ones for which law enforcement existed. “Cops are armed,” she shouted.

“Exactly.” Philip hissed. “We’re not inviting in a bunch of scared patrolmen with automatic weapons and minimal training who just want to get home to their families after their shift ends. That’s how we get our kids killed.”

The footsteps grew fainter. In the distance, Imani heard a car door slam. Still, she waited for Philip to back into the dining room before emerging from her makeshift bomb shelter.

Imani grabbed her phone as she headed over to the window. She scanned the glass for a circular hole. A large crack ran from the window’s center to its right corner. Hairline fractures extended off a broken line. But there didn’t seem to be a bullet entrance.

“Was it a drive-by shooting?” The question felt foreign to Imani, as if she were speaking in another language. When she told people that she’d grown up in the Bronx, they often pictured her living in an area where drivers rolled their windows up, the kind of place with corner drug dealers and omnipresent housing projects. But Riverdale was not an area that ’90s rappers wrote rhymes about. It had been—and still was—a wealthy suburb on the outskirts of Westchester County populated by affluent professionals and two-parent, office-working households.

Philip ran his thumb over the window crack. “A gun didn’t do this.” He tilted his head to see through an undamaged section of glass. “An idiot threw something at the window.”

The dismissive “idiot” was supposed to make her feel better, Imani figured. But idiots often caused the most damage. “Do you think this has something to do with the Walkers?”

Philip turned from the darkened street. “Why would it have anything to do with the Walkers?”