"You're hurting me," she said. "You're hurting me. Let go. Let go of me. Please let go, please, she's coming, she's going to see—"
"Stop moving," he said. "Stop. I need you to stop moving and calm down."
"I'm not moving. I'm not moving. Please."
She was not moving. He knew she was not moving. He did not let go. Some part of him was standing at a distance from the rest of him, watching, and that part noted, quite calmly, that his fingers were closed around her arms the way the man's in the blue blazer had been closed around his own in the Safeway in Everett, and it noted that he did not let go, and it did not tell him why.
Behind him, the steel door of the package room swung open.
The man in the doorway had a plastic grocery bag in each hand and a third hooked over his wrist, and rain on the shoulders of a blue work shirt with a white oval patch over the pocket that said ISAAC in red script. He was tall, as tall as Kurt or taller, and broad through the chest and narrow in the face, with close-cut hair going gray at the temples and reading glasses folded into the shirt pocket under the patch. The bags were the thin white kind with an orange logo, a wave and a sun, and the words BAYVIEW OUTLET GROCERY, and one of them was heavy enough that its handles had stretched into strings and were cutting into his fingers. Kurt saw all of that in the half second before he saw the man's face, and then he saw the man's face and did not see anything else.
"Daddy," the girl said.
The man did not move. That was the first thing Kurt would think about afterward, how completely he did not move. He stood in the doorway with his weight on his heels and his hands full and looked at Kurt's hands on his daughter's arms, and then at the groceries on the floor, the cans, the clementines, the jam, and then at Kurt's face, and something passed across his own face that Kurt had seen on a lot of faces in sixteen years and had never, until that second, had to look at from this close while knowing that it was meant for him.
"That's my daughter," the man said. His voice was quiet and very level. "I need you to let go of her arms."
"Sir, I'm a police officer. I need you to step back out of the room."