“You don’t mean that.”
“I do mean it. Every word. Do not call me again. Do not email me. Do not contact me in any way. We are done, Craig. For good.”
He chuckled. That particular low, patronizing sound he made when I said something he found amusing in its wrongness. Like a parent listening to a toddler explain why bedtime shouldn’t exist.
“You’re cute when you’re fired up. You know that? Always have been. But let’s be honest. Who else is lining up? You’re a thirty-one-year-old single mom with a dead husband and a kid who barely talks. I was doing you a favor, and deep down, you know it.”
I should have hung up. Every therapist-approved instinct I had was screaming at me to end the call. But something in me, something stubborn and furious and tired of being talked over, needed him to hear it.
“You were never doing me a favor. You were a mistake I made when I was lonely, and the only good thing that came out of knowing you is that I’ll never make that mistake again. You are toxic. You are cruel. And if you ever come near me or my son again, I will use every email you’ve ever sent me and I will bury you.”
Silence. Then another chuckle, softer this time. “We’ll see.”
I hung up. Set the phone on the counter and pressed both palms flat against the surface, arms locked, head down. My pulse was hammering. My jaw ached from clenching.
I breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way my therapist had taught me. Four counts in. Hold. Four counts out. Again. The kitchen was quiet. The dishwasher hummed. Nothing in the room had changed.
I did it three more times before my hands stopped shaking.
Then I looked out the back window.
The yard was empty.
No William at the fence gap. No small shape crouched in the grass. No sound of pinecones hitting cedar or laughter carrying over the top rail.
“William?”
I crossed to the back door and stepped onto the deck. The yard stretched out in front of me, the fence gap visible at the far end. Maybe William had gone through the hole over to Ben’s yard. I supposed that was inevitable, but I’d have to talk to him about it. He couldn’t just wander over to Ben’s house anytime he felt like it.
“William! Time to come inside!”
Nothing.
I went back through the house and up to my bedroom window, the one that looked down over both backyards. Ben’s yard was visible from here, the whole stretch of it, from the back deck to the fence line.
Empty. No William. No Jolly.
Had he come inside while I was talking to Grade A Asshole? I hoped not. Hoped he hadn’t heard any of that conversation.
I checked William’s room. The bathroom. Back downstairs, through every room, calling his name louder each time. The house echoed back at me, hollow and useless.
Then I heard an engine in the driveway. A truck door. The familiar sound of a tailgate lowering, a crate being opened.
I went to the front window.
Ben was in his driveway. Jolly jumped down from the back of the truck, harness still on, and shook himself. Ben reached back into the cab for something.
They’d just gotten home. Both of them. Together.
My hand found the wall because the floor had tilted. William had said something about Jolly. He’d asked to go, and I’d said yes. But Jolly was here. Jolly was right here in Ben’s driveway. Jolly had never been home.
I was out the front door before I’d finished forming the thought.
Ben saw my face and went still. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t find William.” The words came out high and strange. “He said he was going to play with Jolly a sort time ago. I was on the phone. He’s not in the yard, he’s not in the house. But Jolly’s been with you.”
Something behind his expression recalibrated. I’d seen it before when he’d demonstrated training exercises at the assembly. The shift from person to operator. Everything nonessential dropping away.
