My Husband Cooked Dinner, and Minutes After My Son and I Ate, We Both Collapsed. I Played Dead on the Floor and Heard Him on the Phone: “Soon They’ll Both Be Gone”

I want to explain that choice, because I have wondered about it since, and I think it is the truest window into the person the night had made of me.

Every instinct I had was screaming to run — to grab my son and get out the back and into the trees and away, to put as much dark distance between us and that house as our poisoned legs could manage.

And I did not.

I stopped, in the middle of an escape from a man who wanted us dead, to retrieve a bag of food from the freezer and hide it in my clothes, because some cold strategist inside me had already looked past tonight, past the running, past the surviving, to the long war that would come after — the war of his word against mine, the courtrooms and the doubt and the reasonable, sympathetic man he would become in front of every official who mattered.

Running would save us tonight.