“The fuses tripped. I got scared and stayed with the neighbor.”
He hugged me. He smelled like cologne and disinfectant.
As I poured coffee, Toby texted again.
“Mom, I found three new policies. You’re the insured. Dad is the beneficiary.”
Below it was a figure that made me grip the cup until my fingers hurt:
24 million dollars.
In that moment, I realized my husband hadn’t come into the house in the middle of the night to scare me.
He’d come to make sure I was never a problem for him again.
PART 2
I need to tell you about Toby, because my son saved my life, and he did it from four hundred miles away.
Toby is nineteen. He’s my son from before Christopher — his father passed when Toby was small — and he’s in his second year studying computer science at a university several states away.
He’s the reason I’m alive to write this.
