Chapter 7: The Key

I did not sign.

I took the envelope, thanked him in the same voice I'd use for a waiter, and walked down the hall to get my son.

Landon let me go.

I think he believed he had finished the job, that the word custody would do what the frozen cards had not.

At home I put Max in front of the ferry book, and I read the petition standing at the sink.

It was fourteen pages.

It said I was emotionally unstable.

It said I had isolated the child.

It said I had been seen "disrupting a professional evaluation," and it quoted the principal, who had spoken exactly one sentence.

At the bottom was a hearing date three weeks away.

My lawyer had said not to open the door to anyone Landon sent.

I had decided to include Landon.

So at four that afternoon, when I heard a key turn in my lock, I was holding the bread knife.

The front door swung open.

A woman in a navy dress and a silver bob stepped into my hallway and looked at the knife.

"Don't be dramatic, Joanna," said Patricia Reed. "It's only me."

My mother-in-law had a key to every house her son owned, and she had never once used one of them.

She was sixty-four years old and wore her late husband's gold watch on her own wrist, loose, with the clasp taped.

She set her handbag on the entry table and looked past me at Max.

He had come to the kitchen door with his headphones around his neck.

"Hello, Maxwell."

Max looked at her.

"Hello," he said carefully. "Grandma has a watch."

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