And I got up from my chair, and I crossed the room to the safe.

Chapter 2 — The Blue Folder

The wall safe behind my desk is a heavy old thing, steel, with a dial you have to spin by hand.

I spun it, and the mechanism gave its familiar series of clicks, and the door swung open, and I reached inside and took out a thick blue folder that had been waiting in the dark for six years for a night like this one.

I laid it open on the desk.

I knew everything in it, but I looked anyway, because I wanted to be looking at the truth when I made the call I was about to make.

There were the property deeds, the ironclad ones, drawn up by lawyers who did not make mistakes, every page of them bearing my name and only my name.

There were the bank transfers, six years old, documenting to the penny the fortune I had moved to pull my son out of the fire.

And there, near the back, folded soft from handling, was a letter Steven had written me six years ago, in the worst week of his life, in his own hand, the ink blurred in one corner where something wet had fallen on it while he wrote. I owe you my life, Mom. Five words.

He had meant them, then.

I believed he had meant them.

I held that letter for a moment beside the memory of the text message glowing on my phone, the two of them together, the boy who had owed me his life and the man who had banned me from his son’s birthday to please a woman who despised me.

Somewhere in the six years between those two pieces of writing, my son had made a trade, and he had not thought his mother would ever make him pay for it.

He had assumed my love was a thing without a bottom, a well he could draw from forever while spitting into it.