“It’ll go by quickly,” I assured her, though privately I felt the same impatience, for very different reasons.

“Why don’t we watch a movie while we wait?”

We settled on one of her favorites, though I couldn’t focus on the animated characters.

My mind kept returning to the recordings—to Rebecca and Philip’s casual cruelty as they planned to dismantle my life and ship Alice off to boarding school.

My phone buzzed with a text from Luka.

“Everything in place.