He watched them become unmistakable.
He watched his stepfather research, methodically, how to end his wife’s life and collect on it — and he watched, in the account’s document sync, three new life insurance applications appear, all naming me as the insured and Christopher as the beneficiary.
Twenty-four million dollars.
The night it turned from research into action — the night Christopher told me a lie about a meeting two states away and Toby saw the “meeting” location ping, through the same shared account, at a hotel twenty minutes from our house — Toby did the only thing he could do from four hundred miles away.
He called me at 2:13 a.m. and told me to hide.
“I couldn’t call the police first, Mom,” he told me later, shaking. “I had screenshots of searches, not a crime. They might not have gotten there in time. But I could get YOU somewhere safe in ninety seconds. So I did that first. Then I called them.”
