The voice belonged to my brother, Callum. The one person in our family none of us had spoken to in three years. He stepped out from behind the door, and behind him I could see Vanessa sitting on the edge of Theodore’s bed, her wrists bound with a phone charger cord, a strip of tape hanging loose from where she had worked it off her mouth. The thing beside her shattered phone that did not belong in a child’s room was a duffel bag, unzipped, stuffed with cash and what looked like jewelry, my jewelry, from the box I kept in my own closet. Callum was not visiting. Callum was robbing us, and he had used my seven-year-old as a lookout.<\/p>\n
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Callum said, holding up his hands as if he were the reasonable one. “I told the kid nobody had to get hurt. I just needed a few days and a place to lie low.” Theodore pressed his face into my side, sobbing now, and everything he’d said finally made terrible sense. They said you’d be angry. I promised I wouldn’t let anybody in. My little boy had been carrying a grown man’s threat for days, told to keep his own mother out of his own room. Vanessa’s eyes were wide and desperate above the tape. Callum took a step toward me. And that was the moment I stopped being afraid and got very, very calm.<\/p>\n
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