The hospital social worker had already initiated the protocol. Child Protective Services—a phrase that carries the weight of a gavel—had been summoned before the first bag of saline was even hung. I refused to move. I sat in a plastic chair that smelled of industrial citrus and old grief, my eyes fixed on the mottled landscape of purple and sickly yellow blooming across my grandson’s ribs. The doctors were “cautiously optimistic” about his physical chassis, but they couldn’t speak to the engine inside. They couldn’t tell me if his soul was as bruised as his skin.

I leaned down, my lips brushing the top of his peach-fuzz head, whispering promises I wasn’t sure I had the power to keep. I didn’t know then that the real battle hadn’t even begun, or that the monsters weren’t hiding in the shadows, but were currently racing toward the hospital in a late-model SUV.