The calm in his voice was the most frightening thing in the room. Not the standing, not the shaking legs, not the shattered mug at my feet. The calm. It had the quality of something rehearsed across a long time, something he had been waiting to say through conditions that kept not being right, and now the conditions were finally right and he was delivering it with everything he had.

“How are you standing?” I said.“There’s no time. She’s gone. This is our chance.”She. Not Mom. Not your mother. Just she, the pronoun carrying a weight that hit me in the chest before I understood why.

His eyes moved to the hallway camera Brittany had installed the previous year, after telling me someone had tried the back door, and then he leaned close enough that I could see the sweat on his temple and the effort it was costing him to stay upright.
“She lied to you,” he said. “About me. For years.”

We went through the mudroom together, his weight against my side, trembling so badly I could feel it through my sleeve. In the garage he pointed to a shelf buried behind paint cans and old storage bins, and when I shoved them aside there was a loose panel in the wall, and behind the panel was a metal lockbox and a pharmacy bag with his name on the label.

I grabbed both and got him into the passenger seat and started the engine.The back door opened before I could move. Brittany came through the mudroom with her suitcase still in one hand and her eyes showing something I had not seen in seventeen years of knowing her face. She had been gone less than ten minutes. The camera on her phone had sent an alert.