Chapter 4
Andrew swung first.
It was not a committed swing. It was the swing of a man who wanted to create an exit, who had done the calculation and decided that the fastest path out of the hallway was through me rather than around me. He telegraphed it entirely. His right shoulder dropped, his chin came up, his weight shifted back before it shifted forward, and I had moved before his fist finished its arc.
I did not think about it. My body stepped left, my right hand came up and redirected the force of his arm past my face, and then I hit him once, short and direct, the way my father had taught me in the driveway when I was sixteen: don't swing wide, don't try to hurt someone, put your weight behind a very specific point and let physics finish the sentence.
Andrew went down hard onto the carpet beside the bed.
Brittany gasped and scrambled backward, her back finding the wall, her hands going to her mouth. She looked at Andrew on the floor and then at me still standing in the hallway and her face moved through shock and panic and something else, something that was trying to recalibrate the situation in a way that still left her in control of the narrative, and I watched her find the framing before she opened her mouth.
"Craig, stop," she said.
I was not moving.
"He attacked me first," I said. Not to her. To the phone still recording in my jacket pocket.
Andrew groaned from the floor and stayed down, which was the right decision.
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I heard them on the stairs before I saw the lights. The officer in front was a woman, short and deliberate, one hand on the radio at her shoulder, her eyes moving through the room in the professional sequence that takes in everything at once. The man behind her was older, gray at the temples, and he took in the scene with the flat efficiency of someone who had seen this exact configuration of people and furniture more times than he wanted to count.
The red and blue from the hallway threw the bedroom into shifting color, catching the robe, the folded corner of the bed, the broken frame that had slid off the nightstand when Andrew went down.
