…”thought of. I always know where to find you.”
I read it three times. Then I felt Priya’s hand on my shoulder. “You’re not going home tonight,” she said. “Neither is your son.”
She was right, and I knew it, but I didn’t know where else to go. If he’d found the bag, he could find anywhere I’d planned. So Priya handed me her phone and dialed the domestic violence hotline, and a woman named Joanne answered on the second ring.
I told her everything. The house searches. The eight months. The note. She listened, and then she said, very calmly, “Okay. First thing. Don’t trust anything in that bag he touched. Leave it with your friend and don’t take it with you.”
Priya and her husband went through it anyway, after I’d left the table. In the lining, under the passport, they found a small tracker, the kind you put on your keys. He’d stitched the lining closed again so neatly I’d never have noticed.
Joanne arranged everything that night. A police officer met me at my son’s after-school program and walked us both out to a car. By ten o’clock, Leo and I were at a shelter whose address I’m not allowed to share with anyone, and that my husband has never heard of. That was the point.
The next morning an advocate went with me to court, and I got an emergency protective order. She also helped me get a new passport and a copy of Leo’s birth certificate, and she said the thing I’d needed to hear for years: “None of this is your fault, and you don’t have to do it alone.”
It’s been four months. We have a small apartment now, through a program for families like ours. Leo has his own room with glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.
Last night I wrote a note of my own and put it in my son’s lunchbox. It said: “We’re exactly where we’re supposed to be.” For the first time, I believed every word.
