After my husband hurt me, I lay on the kitchen floor while our five-year-old son watched. My little boy grabbed my phone and called the person his father had tried to keep out of our lives. “Grandpa, please come. Mom needs help.” Minutes later, my husband returned and spotted the phone. “Who did you call?” he demanded. My father’s voice answered through the speaker: “Me.”

By seven in the morning, the rain had stopped, leaving Tacoma wrapped in that thick, milky fog that rolls off the snowfields of Mount Rainier and settles in the tideflats like wet wool.

The Sea Sprite was surrounded by three police cruisers, an ambulance, and a crime scene van. The dock smelled of spilled coffee, wet wool, and the sulfurous exhaust of idling diesels.

Evan was gone.

They hadn't needed to put him in an ambulance; they had wrapped him in two yellow hypothermia blankets, clicked three sets of steel cuffs around his wrists behind his back, and shoved him into the steel cage of Unit 44 while he was still shivering so hard his knees were banging together. He hadn't looked at me when they walked him up the gangway. He had kept his head down, his wet socks trailing water across the fir planks, his mouth clamped shut like an oyster.

In the small cabin of the boat, the table was covered with paper.

Not the carbon-copy police forms this time. Real paper.

A woman named Margaret Cole was sitting across from me. She was fifty, with gray-streaked hair cut into a sharp bob, wearing a sensible wool blazer and carrying an ancient leather briefcase that looked like it had been through three wars. She was the senior staff attorney for the Pierce County Domestic Violence Advocacy Project, and she had arrived thirty minutes after Higgins called the intake desk.

"This is the comprehensive order," Margaret said, her voice dry, precise, and devoid of the false pity that usually made me want to scream. She tapped a twenty-page document with a silver pen. "It’s not just a seventy-two-hour stay-away. It’s an order of protection with full exclusionary rights to the 38th Street property for one year, renewable upon petition."

"He said it was his deed," I whispered. My arm was resting on the table now, supported by two pillows Clara had brought from her car.

"The deed doesn't matter when there’s a Class C felony indictment pending," Margaret said without looking up from her notes. "He’s being charged with second-degree assault domestic violence, felony harassment with a deadly weapon enhancement—because of the chair—and custodial interference for taking your keys and phone. The bail magistrate has already set his bond at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, cash only. His family doesn't have that kind of equity, Beth. He’s going to be in the Pierce County Jail on Pacific Avenue until his omnibus hearing in November."

"And after that?"

"After that, he goes to trial, or he takes the state’s offer," Margaret said, finally looking at me over the top of her reading glasses. "The offer is forty-eight months at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center. If he takes it, he serves thirty-eight with good time. That gives you three years of clean air."

Three years.

The phrase sounded vast, like an ocean I didn't know how to navigate. I had spent seven years planning my life in fifteen-minute increments—calculating whether I had enough time to fold the towels before the truck entered the driveway, whether the tone of his text message meant I should make beef or chicken for dinner, whether seventy-three dollars was enough to survive for twelve hours.

"What do I do with the house?" I asked.

"You sell it," Clara said from the galley counter, where she was frying eggs on Dad’s two-burner propane stove. "You sell it, Beth. You don't spend another night in that split-level coffin."

"She can't sell it without his signature or a court order from the family division," Margaret corrected gently. "But she can petition for exclusive occupancy and an immediate partition action. We handle that through our legal clinic. You don't pay for the filings, Beth. The county victims' fund covers the docket fees."

From the forward berth came the sound of feet hitting the floor.

Noah walked out of the gloom, his Hudson’s Bay blanket dragging behind him like a royal train. He was still wearing his dinosaur pajamas, his hair sticking up on one side where he had slept against the hull. He didn't look at the lawyer. He didn't look at the shotgun that was now locked back inside the cedar cabinet behind the stove.

He walked straight to the table, climbed onto the bench beside me, and laid his head against my good left shoulder.

"Is the water gone?" he asked.

"The water’s right outside, baby," I said, my hand smoothing down his cowlick. "See through the port? It’s just the tide going out."

"Did Grandpa shoot the bad gun?"

The cabin went dead silent. Clara froze with the spatula in her hand. Margaret Cole’s pen stopped scratching across the legal pad.

Dad stepped down through the companionway hatch, his arms full of clean firewood he had brought from the dock storage locker. He set the split cedar into the wood-box beside the stove with three distinct, heavy thuds, wiped his hands on his canvas apron, and looked down at his grandson.

"Grandpa shot a piece of rotten wood, Noah," Dad said. His voice was quiet, steady, the gravel completely smoothed out. "Wood was soft. Needed to come off the boat anyway."

Noah thought about this for three seconds, his small thumb finding its way back toward his mouth. He looked at the white bandage on my cheek, then up at his grandfather’s grease-stained fingers.

"Can we go look at the cranes now?"

Dad didn't smile—Arthur Vance wasn't a man for smiling before noon—but his eyes softened until they looked like the gray bay when the sun breaks through the clouds.

"Cranes are working the container ship down at Terminal 7," Dad said, reaching out to tap Noah’s nose with one broad index finger. "Big German ship. Six hundred feet long. If you eat two of those eggs your aunt is burning, I’ll take you down to the catwalk and let you push the horn button."

Noah’s eyes went wide. He scrambled off the bench and marched straight toward the galley stove, dragging his blanket behind him like an admiral reporting for duty.

Margaret Cole closed her leather briefcase with two sharp, metallic clicks. She stood up, reached across the table, and took my left hand in hers. Her grip was warm, dry, and surprisingly strong for a woman who lived behind a desk.

"You have a long road, Bethany," she said. "The courts are slow, and men like Evan don't give up easily. He’ll write you letters from jail. He’ll send his mother to your grocery store to tell you how much he misses his boy. He’ll promise he’s found God and quit drinking."

"I know," I said.

"Do you know what you’re going to say?"

I looked down at the cracked screen of my phone, sitting on the chart table beside my father’s empty tea mug. The banking app was still open. The balance hadn't changed.