“Grandma, I can’t—”
“Get. In. The. Car,” she repeated. There was no room in her tone for negotiation. It was an order.
I felt heat rush to my face—anger, embarrassment, relief, all tangled together in a suffocating knot. Evelyn opened the back door of the sedan. I hesitated.
Laya looked up at me. “Mom,” she said, her voice small and steady. “It’s okay.”
The fact that my six-year-old was comforting me was the final straw. I nodded.
“Okay.”
Laya climbed in first, clutching her backpack like a shield. I slid in beside her, half-expecting someone to tap on the window and tell me this was all a mistake, that I wasn’t allowed to leave the poverty I had fallen into.
As the door shut, sealing us into the plush, leather-scented silence, Evelyn didn’t drive immediately. She sat with her hands resting lightly on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead.
Then she spoke, her voice calm and terrifying.
“By tonight,” she said, “I will know who did this.”
My stomach flipped.
“Grandma,” I said, leaning forward. “I don’t understand. Who did what?”
“No,” she said, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror. “You don’t. And that tells me everything I need to know.”
She pulled out her phone, tapped a single contact, and put it on speaker.
“Call Adam.”
