No one called.
That was fine.
By then, silence had stopped being a wound and become weather.
When my children finally came looking for me, it was not because they missed their mother.
It was because they had gone to check on the fortune and discovered it was gone.
Laura called first.
Her voice was sharp, breathless, and offended.
“Mom, where are you?”
I let it go to voicemail.
Michael called seven minutes later.
“What did you do?”
That message I saved.
Not because it hurt me.
Because it told the truth.
He did not ask where I was.
He asked what I had done.
Fiona left a message at 3:42 p.m.
At first, she sounded like she was crying.
Then she said, “You can’t just make decisions like this without talking to us.”
I laughed once, quietly, in my small kitchen.
Because I had talked to them for ten years.
