Chapter 13 - THE PRICE OF SILENCE
The sound of breaking glass dragged me out of sleep. I stayed behind my bedroom door and called 911. By the time the officers arrived, the yard was empty.
Nothing had been taken. A stone lay inside the back hall with a folded note rubber-banded around it: OLD WOMEN SHOULD KNOW WHEN TO QUIT.
Lois arrived before the glass company. She carried coffee, a heavy sweater, and the kind of anger that made her unusually quiet.
“Move in with me for a few days,” she said.
“I hate leaving my own house.”
“You're not surrendering it. You're sleeping somewhere the windows aren't broken.”
So I packed a bag. The last thing I lifted from my dresser was a picture of Frank fishing with Michael when he was nine. Michael's grin was missing a front tooth. I wondered how a little boy I loved so fiercely could become a man who stood beside cruelty because confronting it made him uncomfortable.
At Lois's house, I began to tell her what I had kept quiet for five years. Her jokes about my hearing. Her insistence I stop driving at night. How she spoke for me in restaurants.
“She was building a story about you,” Lois said.
“And I helped her by laughing.”
“No. You were trying to keep your son close.”
I wanted to argue, but my throat closed.
A police detective called that afternoon. The threats and property damage were being investigated, and he asked whether anyone could have had access to my doorbell account. I told him Jessica had helped install it.
“Change the password,” he said. “Preserve the old login history.”
The account log showed remote access at 2:14 a.m., moments before the window broke. The registered device was named JESSICA'S IPAD.
And the person who had signed into it was not Jessica.
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