Dan was not okay.
Soaking wet, shivering cold, legally blind, partially deaf, famished, impoverished, excluded, deceived, shot at, beaten up, and robbed of the one critical asset he needed to lead his family to safety, it was fair to say Dan had never been less okay.
Worse, he didn’t see any reason to hope things might get better.
He didn’t see much of anything on that long walk home in the freezing rain. Without glasses, his vision was so impaired that all he could make out of the buildings he passed were fuzzy shapes. Once the sun had set, he couldn’t even see those. If he hadn’t already turned onto Willis Road by the time it got dark, he might have missed the intersection and wound up wandering the streets until he succumbed to hypothermia. As it was, he barely made it back up the hill to Brantley Circle, his legs trembling and his blistering feet squishing in his soggy shoes with every step. Approaching his house, he thought he discerned a blurry corona of candlelight through the living room window, but it might just as easily have been the spots in his eyes.
The front door was locked. He pounded on it with as much strength as he could muster.
“Who is it?” It was Chloe’s voice.
“It’s Dad!”
His daughter—actually, a shadowy blur about the same height as his daughter—opened the door, holding a flashlight.
“Ohmygod, Daddy! Are you okay?”
“Kind of . . . ?”
He staggered past her, collapsed onto the stairs, and pulled his shoes off.
“Do you need help?”
“No . . .” His socks were dripping wet. He peeled them away from his gray feet, which were wrinkled and frigid to the touch.
“Dan?” He heard Jen’s footsteps coming down the hall from the kitchen behind a jerky flashlight beam. “Ohmygod!”
“Holy shit!” That was Max, arriving from the living room.
All three of them had cursed in horror at the sight of him. That couldn’t be good.
“What can we do for you?” Chloe asked.
“Nothing. Just need my glasses. And dry clothes.”
“What happened to your glasses?”
Dan hobbled up the stairs without answering and made his way across his darkened bedroom by sense memory.
Fortunately, his spare pair was in its usual place inside the medicine cabinet of the main bath. Once he got them on and his vision resolved—not that he could see anything in the near-total darkness—he stripped off his soggy clothes.
His whole body was shivering. There hadn’t been any heat in the house for a while now, and the temperature was dropping inside as well as out. Dan grabbed a towel from the wall rack and dried himself off as best he could.
“Here.” It was Jen, the flashlight beam preceding her again. She handed him a pair of long underwear.
“Thank you.” He sat down on the toilet seat to put it on.
He couldn’t stop shivering.
By the time he got the thermal underwear on, Jen was back with socks, pants, a T-shirt, and a wool sweater. She set her flashlight bottom up on the counter, giving him enough light to see as he dressed.
“What happened to you?”
“Long story. I really need food.”
“I’m making pasta. I’ll heat up some soup for you, too. Come down when you’re dressed.” She exited to the bedroom.
“Jen—”
“Yeah?” She paused next to the bed, barely visible in the gloom.
“From now on,” he told her, “nobody leaves the house without a knife.”
She let out a dry chuckle as she leaned over to pick up something she’d left atop the mattress.
“I think we’re past knives, Dan.”
He figured his eyes must be playing tricks on him, because as she straightened up and walked away, it looked for a moment like his wife was holding an assault rifle.