Last month, on the anniversary of the night everything changed, Toby came home.
We didn’t mark it with sadness. We marked it with dinner, in the house my father built, in the bright new rooms, with the library where the safe room used to be.
At 2:13 a.m. — I was awake, I’m often awake at 2:13, I suspect I always will be — my phone buzzed.
A text from Toby, asleep down the hall, who’d set an alarm.
It said: “Lights on. Safe. Love you, Mom.”
I read it three times.
Then I got up, and I walked through my father’s house, and I turned on every single light — the ones I’d killed at the breaker a year before, when a whispered phone call sent me into the dark.
I stood in the fully lit foyer of the home that was always mine, that no one had managed to take, and I understood the whole shape of it at last.
