“Daddy,” she said, breathless. “I wasn’t scared at all.”
I looked at Walt. Gray beard, gold tooth, scarred hands. The man I’d tried to hit. The man who’d stood guard over my abandoned child for three hours and never once thought about leaving.
“No,” I said. “You’ve got nothing to be scared of. Not with these guys around.”
I used to think I knew what a dangerous man looked like.
Turns out I had it exactly backwards.
The dangerous ones wear suits and write notes on receipt paper and drive away from gas stations.
The safe ones? Sometimes they’ve got leather vests and loud engines and a coloring book in one hand.
I just had to almost lose everything to finally see it.
