My three-year-old daughter's first word was leave.

No mama or dada, or some barely decipherable word in baby babble.

Leave.

Leave, I'd tell her every night as I rocked her in my arms, my bare back pressed against the cold porcelain of the bathtub, when he raises his voice for the first time. He'll apologize and beg for forgiveness. He'll assure it was just a one-time thing, a slip.

Leave, I'd breathe as she sat in her playpen beside me, picking up shards of the beautiful glass vase my mother had gifted me months prior, when he raises his hand at you for the first time. It won't stop. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't a reflex. It was just a slap or shove now, but it'll become a punch or a chokehold. It happened, and now he's got a taste for blood, and he'll be sure to crave it again.

No amount of internal confliction or mental preparation could have prepared me for this morning. The echoes of my daughter's screams still lingered somewhere between the ringing in between my ears. Her thrashing in her father's grip as he shook her still flickered before me, muddying with my reddening vision. The blue and red flashes blinded me as I stepped off the curb and onto the asphalt, hardly able to make out the swat cars and the occupants of them standing to their sides with their guns aimed at me. I wanted desperately to assure them it wasn't me they wanted to shoot, possibly even hold my hands up in surrender to prove I was unarmed, but they remained wrapped around the trembling toddler in my arms and I refused to move them in fear that the moment they tore her from me I would never hold her again.

Danielle's nails dug into the back of my neck, but it was a prick against my skin in comparison to the agonizing throbbing in my temple and stomach. I held her head with my right hand, my bloodied fingers lost in her blond curls, the left under her butt. But with every step I took, the weaker I felt, and the more I feared I'd fully collapse any second.

In a quick movement that left me seeing double for a few seconds, a wisp of pastel colors shot into my blurry line of sight, and the next time I blinked my eyes were met with familiar green irises, misty with fresh tears surfacing.

"Harley!" Ashley was staring at me in horror, extending her arms as she stepped in my path, acting as a barricade between me and the parking lot of law enforcement. "Harley, give me Danni!"

I hardly heard my best friend through the ringing in my ears and started to shake my head when she took another step toward me. I fell back one, hugging my daughter tighter against me. I knew she would never put my baby at risk, but the adrenaline, anxiety, and fear had yet to subside, and I didn't follow her order. I couldn't.

"Har." Ashley tried again, reaching behind her head to grasp her thick blonde waves in a fist, and quickly tied it up, then extended her arms expectantly. "I need you to hand her over."

I blinked rapidly trying to comprehend what was happening, but it only intensified the aching in my head.

Realizing I wasn't going to oblige willingly, Ashley closed the little distance that remained between us and pried Danielle's fingers from my trembling shoulders, cooing to her as she rubbed her back soothingly. Not long after one of the paramedics rushed my best friend and she handed over my daughter without a second of hesitation. Ashley closed the stretch between us once more, but when she returned this time, the tears had started to fall, her teeth biting into her bottom lip to keep it from quivering.

"What?" I wasn't sure if I said it aloud. I felt my lips move but couldn't hear if anything had broken passed them. She only shook her head and lifted her hand up again, this time to touch at my forehead. When she retracted it, her entire palm was covered in blood. She started to speak again, but the words were lost in the ringing once more and I started to turn, my eyes zeroing in on the front door of the apartment. It wasn't until one of the officer's pulled hard and Dalton fell through the doorway and onto his knees hard on the shoe scuffed beige welcome mat in front of the door that reality fully set in.

The argument. Danielle calling Ashley. Dalton breaking shit, threatening me, until he came to the obvious conclusion it wasn't working and decided to resort to physical abuse as usual. Only today, he crossed the line of no return. He bashed beer bottles into my temple, threw a chair across the room so it nicked our daughter in the chin.

He tried to kill me.

"Harley!" Ashley was shouting again, this time grasping my shoulders and shaking me as my fiancé had our daughter less than twenty minutes ago. "Can you hear me?"

I started to shake my head again but tore my eyes from Dalton and to the EMTs crowded around the back of an ambulance talking to my inconsolable three-year-old daughter. I began my trek to her but was intercepted halfway to her. Thinking it was Ash again, I spun, ready to tell her off, but I was faced with a New Jersey Police Department badge glistening inches from my chin. Slowly, I lifted my head and met cold, hardened brown eyes. He was saying something, his mustache twitching with every word that left his mouth, but as hard as I tried, I couldn't hear him.

Concluding his words weren't audible to me, he grasped my arm aggressively, as if I were the one who'd tried to kill someone and dragged me behind him to the back of an ambulance. He conversated with a petite brunette as she tended to my head, but my eyes remained glued to Danielle as Ashley crouched in front of her and rubbed her knees comfortingly. Not long after my mother and father were racing across the lot to my daughter, my father clutching her small frame to his chest and blocking her from my sight entirely.

Once my parents had come to the outstanding realization that their daughter was still breathing, they left Ash with Danni and hurried my way. Dad did the same he had to my three-year-old to me and I breathed in his Old Spice and aftershave-a scent I never thought I'd have the chance to smell again. I dug my nails in his shoulders, shaking my head against him despite the EMT trying to clean my temple. She gave up momentarily and let my father cradle me to his chest, whispering into my head, unaware that I couldn't hear a thing he said.

Mom was a little more hesitant in approaching me. She took my face between both of her hands and raked my face, tears surfacing with every new bruise, laceration, or scratch she saw on me. Then she slowly pressed me into her chest and somehow, her hold on me was tighter than Dad's. As if she were terrified at the thought of letting me go again.

Once Mom and Dad had left to go join my daughter in the hospital, Ash returned to me, standing against the back of the ambulance as my hearing slowly started to return. She must have realized it when my head whipped up at the sound of a helicopter circling overhead.

"Harley?" Ash was careful in touching my shoulder, her French Tips red with blood as she dragged them down my bare arm. "Babe, are you okay?"

I about thrust my arms in a gesture toward the parking lot, but I couldn't move and just stared at her blankly.

You were right, I wanted to tell her. You were right and I pushed you away. I pushed everyone away.

"It's going to be okay." she assured, lacing her fingers through mine. "I've got you, Harley. You're okay now."

I leaned into her, resting the left side of my face against her shoulder, wishing I could open my mouth and express the amount of gratitude I had for her saving my life. For saving Danni's. But she knew. I could see it in the way she stared down at me as tears silently fell from her lashes and hit my cheek, becoming one with my own. I could see it in how she held me and nodded knowingly, a silent promise she wasn't going to let me push her away again.

"He's gone." As she said the words, I found it hard to tell if she was trying to reassure herself or me of his arrest. "He won't be able to hurt you guys again."

Lies, I wanted to say, shaking her until she could step inside my head for even a second. He made it so I'll have to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life.