Nathaniel scooped Emma up immediately, feeling her small, cold hands cling to his shirt collar, her sobs shaking her entire small frame against him. He turned toward Vivian, fury building rapidly beneath his relief at finding his daughter safe.
He shrugged off his blazer in one sharp, aggressive motion, wrapping it around Emma's shivering shoulders before rounding on Vivian fully, his voice rising with a fury he rarely allowed himself to display. "Why was she locked outside?" he demanded. "It's fifty degrees out there, Vivian! She's seven years old!"
Vivian regarded him with the same calm, unbothered expression she'd worn since he'd burst through the door, entirely unmoved by the intensity of his anger. "She was being too loud," she said simply, as though the explanation were entirely self-evident and reasonable. "I had a headache. I needed quiet."
The casualness of her response landed like a physical blow, the sheer indifference in her tone somehow more infuriating to Nathaniel than if she'd offered some elaborate, desperate justification. "You locked a seven-year-old outside in the cold because you had a headache?"
"I checked on her every few minutes," Vivian said, folding her arms with the faint irritation of someone being unreasonably interrogated. "She's fine, Nathaniel. You're overreacting."