Chapter 1 — The Phone Call

“Please don’t faint on me, ma’am.

Your son’s been sitting outside our store since four this afternoon, and he tells me there’s no adult at home.”

I was standing in my dead mother’s kitchen in Chicago when a stranger said that to me, and the floor of the world quietly went out from under my feet.

I had flown out two weeks earlier to bury her.

She had died with no warning, and I had spent the days since doing the terrible administrative work that death leaves behind — the legal papers, the bank, the slow dismantling of a whole life into labeled cardboard boxes.

My eight-year-old, Jonah, was supposed to be home in Cincinnati with my husband, safe, looked after, fine.

That was what I had been told, every single day, for two weeks.

“I’m sorry,” I managed.

“You have my son?

He’s — he’s all right?”

“He’s all right,” the woman said, and her voice was kind and very careful, the voice of a person trying not to frighten someone already frightened.

“He’s had a sandwich.

He’s sitting with me.

But sweetheart, he’s been out here a long time, and he keeps telling me there’s nobody at your house.

I’ve already called the police.”

I gripped the edge of my mother’s counter and made myself breathe.

“Can I talk to him?