Their mother started to object, then stopped.
“Are you taking them away from me?”
“I’m making sure they’re safe tonight. I’m not turning this into a fight in front of them.”
That night was strange because the house looked exactly the same.
Same cabinets.
Same refrigerator humming behind me.
Same stack of mail near the counter.
But every ordinary object seemed connected to a timeline I hadn’t known existed.
At 1:17 p.m., the hidden phone had received a message.
Before lunch, their mother had walked out.
Seventeen minutes was what Tessa had been promised.
Hours later, my daughter had been sitting on the kitchen floor trying not to drop her baby brother.
Those were not interpretations.
They were facts.
Over the next few days, their mother and I kept the conversations away from the kids as much as possible.
The relationship with R mattered, obviously, but I refused to let betrayal between adults swallow the part that had actually put a child in danger.
