I drove toward Manhattan while the snow ticked against the windshield. Leo fell asleep before we reached the Hutchinson River Parkway. I kept looking at him in the rearview mirror, his head tipped against the car seat, his blue pom-pom hat still crooked.
I couldn’t erase what he’d heard at that table. But I could choose what happened next.
I checked us into a hotel on the Upper West Side. The clerk at the front desk gave Leo a little chocolate turkey wrapped in gold foil, and he woke up just long enough to take it and say thank you. In the room, high above the street, he asked if I could leave a light on.
I helped him into the big bed under a thick white comforter and sat beside him until he fell asleep again, the gold foil turkey clutched in one hand.
Two hours after we’d left the house, my phone buzzed.
We’re here, David wrote.
I opened my laptop on the hotel desk.
There were security cameras at the house. After a break-in down the street two years earlier, the property manager had installed cameras over the front door, the back door, and in the downstairs hallway and the living room. My parents knew about them. They’d signed an acknowledgment. My father had complained that they made the house look like a bank.
On the living room camera, my mother was pouring herself another glass of wine. My father had lit a cigar in his leather armchair, something he only did on holidays.
On the upstairs hallway camera, Natalie was holding a measuring tape against the doorway of my old bedroom while Terrence watched with his arms crossed. I could see two large suitcases standing just inside the door.
Then someone knocked hard on the front door.
My father walked toward it wearing the expression he always wore when he expected to win an argument. He opened the door.
