If Mom is reading this, it means things have already gotten out of control.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and cried into that notebook, holding it against my chest, because I could see now exactly what my son had done.

He had found something.

He had understood it well enough to document it.

And he had known, writing that last line, that a day might come when he wasn’t there to explain it — and he had left it where his mother would eventually find it, a message thrown forward to me across whatever was coming.

I sat with that notebook for a long time, and what undid me most was not the danger it represented but the loneliness of it.