She took his hand, keeping her body pressed tightly against his legs as they walked down the front steps, made their way across the lawn, headed toward the car parked on the driveway. He counted six vans today, up from four yesterday. From this distance, he couldn’t make out the station call letters. He’d have to check it out later, see if they’d broken onto the national stage.

“What happened to your face, Jason?”

“Did the police give you a black eye?”

“Have you been in a fight?”

He kept himself and Ree moving, slow and steady, across the yard, homing in on the Volvo. Then he had the keys out, the doors clicking open.

Police brutality, he thought idly, as more questions followed about his face and his ribs protested as he swung open the heavy car door.

Then Ree was inside, the back passenger door closed. And he was inside, the driver’s door closed. He started the engine, and immediately the reporters’ shrill questions disappeared.

“Good job,” he told Ree.

“I don’t like reporters,” she informed him.

“I know. Next time, I’m getting my own pair of fairy wings.”

He cracked at the grocery store. Couldn’t seem to find the parental fortitude to deny his traumatized daughter Oreos, Pop-Tarts, bags of bakery-fresh chocolate chip cookies. Ree figured out his weakness early on, and by the end of the trip they had a grocery cart half-filled with junk food. He thought he’d managed milk, bread, pasta, and fruit, but to tell the truth, his heart wasn’t in it.

He was killing time with his daughter, desperate to give them a slice of normalcy in a world that had tilted crazily. Sandy was gone. Max was back. The police would continue asking questions, he’d been an idiot to have ever used the family computer….

Jason didn’t want this life. He wanted to turn the clock back sixty hours, maybe seventy hours, and say whatever it was he should’ve said, do whatever it was he should’ve done, so this never would have happened. Hell, he’d even take back the February vacation.

The woman manning the cash register smiled down at Ree’s glamorous getup. Then her gaze went to him and she did a double-take. He shrugged self-consciously, following the cashier’s line of sight to the newsstand, where he saw his own black-and-white picture staring out from the front page of the Boston Daily. “Mild-mannered reporter may have hidden dark side,” the banner headline declared.

They had used the photo from his official press pass, a closely cropped image that was barely one step above a mug shot. He looked flat, even vaguely menacing, staring out above the fold.