Chapter 2 - What Was on Her Phone"Where are you right now, Priscilla?" I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm even to my own ears.
"I'm — I'm at a coffee shop near your house," she stammered. "Desmond panicked when he realized you'd taken Milo. He told me to leave before you got back."
"Stay there," I said. "I'm coming to talk to you."
I drove to my parents' house first. My mother opened the door surprised to see me at that hour, but the second she saw Milo's bare feet and my face, she stopped asking questions. She wrapped him in a blanket, walked him to the guest room with a glass of warm milk, and promised me she'd keep him safe for as long as I needed.
Twenty minutes later I met Priscilla at that coffee shop. She looked like a shell of herself — eyes swollen red, her nice coat wrinkled like she'd slept in it.
"Bernadette, I'm so sorry—"
"Save it," I said, sitting down across from her. "I don't care about your tears right now. I care about my son. Tell me everything."
Over the next hour, the whole sickening scope of it came out.
For seven months, Desmond had been lying to both of us at once. He'd convinced Priscilla our marriage was over in every way that mattered, told her I was cold and distant and checked out, and used my long twelve-hour nursing shifts to build an entire secret life inside our own house. Every time Priscilla came over, Desmond told Milo it was a "special game" — stay downstairs, stay quiet, wait until Daddy comes back. That poor kid had spent who knows how many nights shivering on the couch or the kitchen floor, waiting for a father who'd completely forgotten he existed the second the guest room door closed.
"He told me every single time that Milo was fast asleep in his room," Priscilla wept into her hands. "I swear to God, Bernadette, if I'd known he was leaving a five-year-old alone downstairs—"
"You still walked into my house," I said, cold and flat. "You still got into bed with my husband under my own roof while I was at the hospital keeping other people's kids alive."
She didn't have an answer for that. She never would.
"Give me your phone," I said.
She hesitated, then handed it over. I scrolled through years of text history between them, watching a marriage and a sisterhood both come apart on one glass screen. But partway through, something else caught my eye — a thread of messages between Desmond and a family law attorney, dated three weeks earlier.
He hadn't just been having an affair. He'd been quietly consulting a lawyer to file for full custody of Milo and claim our house. His whole strategy was built around my work schedule — he'd been compiling a record of my night shifts to paint me as an absent, neglectful mother who wasn't around enough to raise her own child.
He was going to use the exact hours I spent supporting our family to take my son away from me, all while he was the one leaving Milo alone on a cold floor to entertain my own sister.
Something cold and absolutely unshakeable settled into my chest.
"You're going to help me, Priscilla," I said, setting her phone down on the table between us.
May you like
She blinked, wiping her face. "What?"
"Desmond thinks I'm somewhere falling apart right now, panicking, trying to process this," I said, leaning forward. "He's expecting me to come home so he can talk his way out of it. That's not what's happening. You're going to text him right now."
