The voice on the other end went quiet, then sharpened into full attention. “Give me the address,” he said. “We’re already moving.” I recited it from the cold floor of that utility room, my shoulder throbbing, the music thumping through the wall as my son and his wife celebrated on a birthday they had turned into my humiliation. The man on the phone was someone from the life I buried when Marcus was young, the life whose money quietly built the very house I was now locked inside. I had walked away from it to give my son something clean. He had just reminded me, with a bruise and a locked door, exactly what I had traded it for.

“Fifteen minutes,” the voice said, and the line went dead. I sat in the dark and did not cry. I had cried enough decades’ worth of tears into double shifts and skipped meals. Instead, I pressed my palm to the concrete and waited, listening to the laughter that would not last much longer. When the knock came at the front door, it was not loud. It did not need to be. Through the wall I heard the music stop, heard Larissa’s voice go high and confused, heard my son ask who these men were and why they were asking for his mother by a name he had never heard her called. Then I heard the lock on my door turn, and the light poured in.