My twenty two year old daughter Kayla recently moved into an apartment with her boyfriend Tyler, and I believed everything was fine until she called me in tears. She explained that a strange biker with a leather vest and a gray ponytail kept following her to work, the grocery store, and the gas station. Despite being a polite accountant who drives a sedan, I grabbed a baseball bat and drove to the east side of our small town to confront the man scaring my child. I found Ray Dalton working on his motorcycle in his garage and aggressively demanded that he stop following my daughter.Ray calmly told me to put the bat down and explained that he was not stalking Kayla, but rather standing guard over her. He pulled out his phone and showed me a photograph of Kayla at the gas station with deep, purple, fingerprint shaped bruises on her arm. He then retrieved a wooden cigar box containing a twenty year old newspaper clipping about his own daughter, Sarah, who was found dead in a ravine. Ray explained that Sarah had hidden similar bruises caused by her boyfriend, and his failure to intervene resulted in her tragic death. When he recognized the same predatory behavior in Tyler, he vowed to protect Kayla so she would not suffer the same fate.
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