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?”
