“Don’t make this hard,” he said. “I’ve handled everything.”
That was the line I had been waiting for, though I had not known exactly how it would arrive.
“Okay,” I said, and ended the call before the smile I could not prevent became audible.
I walked back to my car, sat behind the wheel, and opened my phone. No tears, no bargaining, no attempt to call him back and reason with the unreasonable. Just one text message to my lawyer, Dana Reynolds, three words that I had been waiting for months to send with genuine basis behind them.
They took the bait. File everything now.
Her reply came within ninety seconds. On it. Stay put.
I put the phone down and looked at my house through the windshield. No movement behind the windows, no silhouette visible in the rooms I had decorated and maintained and paid half the mortgage on for nearly a decade. Across the street, my neighbor’s security camera blinked its small red light in the gathering dark. I had spoken to my neighbor about that camera three months earlier, had mentioned casually that I sometimes worried about break-ins, had asked whether she kept the footage. She did. She kept two weeks of rolling footage and she had, at my request and without understanding the full picture of why I was asking, given me access to a shared folder where the relevant portion would be automatically saved.
My phone rang. Dana.
“Are you safe?” she asked first. She always asked that first.
“Yes,” I said.
