I pressed clothes into her hands. She pulled them on over her pajamas, hands shaking, and I stuffed her feet into the nearest shoes without tying the laces.
The window in Becca’s room faced the backyard. I’d removed the screen dozens of times for sneaking out to meet friends—a skill I’d never imagined would matter beyond avoiding curfew. I popped it free and looked down at the eight-foot drop to the garden below.
I threw both our backpacks out first, then helped Becca through the window frame. She hesitated at the edge, looking down with visible fear—not fear of the height, but fear of everything the height represented: the fact that we were climbing out of our own house in the dark because our father had told us to run from our mother.
I gripped her wrists and lowered her as far as I could reach before letting go. She fell the remaining four feet with a muted thump that sounded explosively loud in the quiet night.
I followed, dropping and rolling, my ankle twisting slightly on landing but holding my weight. Becca was staring at me with questions written across her face, but I grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the back fence.
We scaled it by stepping on the decorative crossbeam. Becca struggled with the height, but I coached her through—one hand on the top rail, step up, swing your leg over, I’ve got you—catching her when she dropped down on the other side. We ran through three backyards before emerging onto a street two blocks from our house, both of us breathing hard, both of us suddenly aware that we were standing in the cold at two in the morning with nowhere to go and no understanding of why we’d left.
The neighborhood looked different at night. The houses I’d grown up walking past—the Hendersons’ place with the overtended garden, the Morrisons’ perpetual Christmas lights, the vacant lot where kids used to build bike jumps—all of it looked foreign, as if Dad’s text had rearranged not just my understanding of my family but my understanding of the geography surrounding it. Everything familiar had become unfamiliar, because the person who’d made it familiar was the person I’d just been told not to trust.
I pulled out my phone and read Dad’s message again, looking for details I’d missed. The timestamp showed 2:03 a.m. No follow-up messages. No missed calls. Just those twelve words hanging in digital space like a grenade with the pin already pulled.
I tried calling him. Straight to voicemail. His professional outgoing message—calm, measured, the voice of the man I knew—was incongruous with the emergency he’d declared. His phone was off, which meant either he’d turned it off deliberately or someone had turned it off for him.
Becca was pulling on my sleeve. “What does he mean, don’t trust Mom? What’s happening?”
