After a hellish day, it feels so good to be home. I grab an ice pack from the freezer for my face and head into the basement and toward my daughters’ bedrooms. I was up at five this morning, got the girls off to school, did a full day at the office, and ended it all with a workout at the gym. I can still taste the blood in my mouth from the sucker punch I took while sparring tonight.

I open Maisy’s door and find her long blonde hair fanned out on her pillow. The room is silent and still as she peacefully sleeps. She may be twelve now, but she’ll always be my little girl. Careful not to wake her, I lean down and kiss her cheek, admiring how beautiful she is. She’s the spitting image of her mother, and sometimes the resemblance is too much to handle. The light is still on in Rianna’s room, which isn’t surprising. Poor girl never sleeps.

Georgia’s sudden departure was particularly hard on Rianna. She remembers so much about her mom and how it was after she left. For a long time, she missed her terribly, but as she grew older, that love and longing turned into anger. Still, to this day, it disturbs her. A fourteen-year-old shouldn’t have to struggle with anxiety like she does.

I reach for the door handle, twist it, and find it locked. “Ria?” I call out, “You up, baby?”

“Uhhh, yeah, one second, Dad.”

“Why’s the door locked?” I ask, jiggling the handle. She never locks it.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean for it to be.” She opens the door and stands in the way, blocking my entrance into her room. She looks entirely too nervous for someone who locked the door by accident.

“What’s going on?” I ask, and she shakes her head.

“Nothing, what happened to you?” she asks, nodding to the ice pack I’m holding against my cheek.

“Oh, one of the guys got a little wild sparring tonight. Nothing to worry about.” And it’s the truth. After Georgia left, I stopped fighting and have been dealing with my issues another way—keeping everything bottled up. But none of that matters. I vowed to focus one hundred percent on the girls and always will.

Rianna is still blocking the doorway, so I glance over her shoulder and raise an eyebrow. “Can I come in?”

“I was just going to bed, Dad.”

“Then I’ll tuck you in.”

“Dad, I don’t need to be tucked in anymore.”

“Sure you do.” I push my way into her room. When I see what she is hiding, my fists ball at my sides. Anger consumes me, and the overwhelming need to kill the boy in her room engulfs me.

This is why I used to fight!

It kept my temper under control. Nowadays, it’s even harder not having the release like I used to, sparring helps, but it’s nothing compared to unleashing a beating upon someone. However, I can’t let myself get out of control.

“Sup, Mr. R.?” Nate, a young boy from down the street, asks without bothering to move from his spot.

On her bed!

Why is he in her room at this time of night? Why is he in the house at all while I’m not here? I take a deep breath through my nose and remind myself to not snap . . . he’s only a kid.

“What the fuck is going on here?” I ask Rianna, who’s chewing on her fingernail nervously. She looks at him and then me. In the moments I wait for her to respond, I swear to God it takes every single ounce of willpower I have not to drag him out of my house by the holes in his stretched earlobes. “We were studying,” he says, and I glance at him, not buying his bullshit lie for one second.

“At ten thirty at night?”

“Yeah,” Rianna agrees.

“Where’s your backpack, Nate?”

“What do you mean, Mr. R.?”

“To study?”

Jesus, this kid is fucking stupid.

“Oh, snap, I left it at school, that’s why I came over so Ria could help me.”

Don’t call her that!

Rianna’s eyes are now firmly locked on the floor, and she’s chomping her nail as if it’s her meal ticket out of here. “Nate, it’s time for you to leave.” My voice is barely audible as I speak through gritted teeth, but he understands every word I say.

I just want him gone.

“All right, have a good night then.” He has the balls to wink at Rianna before looking her up and down as if he could eat her. The way he stares as he walks out of her bedroom makes me lose it. I reach over and take him by the throat, slamming his skinny frame against the wall.

“Dad, don’t!” Rianna yells and pulls at me. I don’t move. I just look into his scared, pathetic eyes and force myself to remember that they are kids. I loosen my grip and tell him, “I don’t want to ever see you in my home or around my daughter again, you got it?” He nods rapidly, and when I let him go, he stumbles up the stairs and out of my house, coughing the whole way.

“You can’t do that, Dad,” Rianna yells at me, clearly pissed off. When I turn toward her, her T-shirt is twisted from clawing at me, and I see a hickey on her chest. It makes my stomach queasy. It can’t be real . . . can it? My hand moves in slow motion, as if they too think my eyes are playing tricks on me, and I push the fabric out of the way, exposing another hickey on her.

She’s covered in them.

She swats at my hand, and I dart into her bathroom, barely making it to the toilet as the remnants of what’s left in my stomach creeps up the back of my throat.

In this moment as I kneel on the floor, I can truly say I am the world’s biggest failure as a father. She is my little girl, and what she is doing . . . oh God, I get sick again. They would’ve been better off with a drunken Georgia than with me.