The text arrived at 2:13 in the morning.
Ethan had found out afterward and laughed. “Your dad’s little paranoia,” he called it. He brought it up sometimes at dinner parties, this quirky anecdote about his slightly eccentric father-in-law who apparently didn’t fully trust his son-in-law even after fifteen years. Everyone would smile politely. I would smile too, and say something like “You know how dads are,” and move on to the next course.
My father never said it out loud. But I understood, sitting there in the dark with my untouched water, what he’d been doing. He’d been leaving me a door.
The next morning, I drove to a strip-mall office on the edge of town, the kind of place with a hand-lettered sign and a waiting room that smelled like toner and peppermint gum. The attorney’s name was Gloria Mendez. She was somewhere in her fifties, gray-streaked hair pulled back tight, reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She looked like someone who had heard every version of every story and was not impressed by any of them.
I handed her my phone and let her read the texts.
She read them slowly. Set the phone down. Looked at me over her glasses.
“You want him out,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“I want him to feel it,” I said.
