The message sat there, delivered but unread, a green bubble floating in digital space between a daughter and a father who might already be beyond reaching. I stared at it and tried not to think about why his phone was off, tried not to run the scenarios that a lifetime of crime documentaries—Mom’s crime documentaries, I realized with a chill—had equipped me to imagine.
My phone rang. Mom’s name on the screen. I stared at it through three rings before answering on speaker so Becca could hear.
“Where are you? What’s going on?” Mom’s voice was tight with barely controlled emotion. “I wake up and both my daughters are gone, windows open—you’re scaring me, honey.”
She sounded genuinely frightened. Nothing in her tone suggested danger. But Dad’s message kept echoing—the urgency, the specificity.
“Dad texted us,” I said carefully. “He said to leave the house and not trust you. We need to know why.”
The silence stretched long enough that I thought the call had dropped. Then Mom laughed—a brittle sound that raised every hair on my neck, because it wasn’t the laugh of someone who’d just heard something absurd. It was the laugh of someone who’d just heard something inconvenient.
“Your father texted you at two in the morning telling you to run from me? That’s insane. He’s in Seattle, probably drunk at some hotel bar.”
But I’d never seen Dad drunk. He barely drank at parties. And the message hadn’t read drunk. It had read terrified.
“Why would he specifically say not to trust you?” I asked. “What’s he afraid you’re going to do?”
Mom’s breathing changed—faster, shallower—and when she spoke again, her voice had transformed into something harder, something I recognized from watching her negotiate real estate deals: the voice she used when a situation was slipping away from her and she needed to regain control.
