“You and your three girls are coming home with me. Now.”

I don’t remember deciding to trust him. There wasn’t time to decide anything. I only remember running up the wide staircase with my heart slamming, and the look on Olivia’s face when I opened the door — the instant, practiced fear, and then the disbelief when I said, get your sisters, we’re leaving, we’re leaving right now. I remember Holly reaching up her arms to be carried.

I remember Erica asking, in a very small voice, whether we were in trouble, and me saying no, baby, no, the opposite, and not being sure it was true.

Down in the foyer, Agatha was screaming. She called me a thief. She called me a lowlife.

She swore, at the top of her lungs, in front of everyone, that I would never take her son’s children out of that house.

But we walked out anyway, the four of us, past forty silent faces, and out the great front doors into the night.