14. Jo
— ? —
Jo
Three days after Brittany’s office visit, the phone rings and stops my heart.
“Ms. Holland? This is Principal Vega at Riverside Elementary.” The voice is level. Too level, the kind of calm that’s its own warning. “There’s been... an incident.”
Keys are already in my hand, feet already moving toward the door. “Is Rory okay? What happened?”
“He’s fine. He’s safe.” A pause that stretches too long. “But a woman came to pick him up today. She had documentation, forged documentation, we believe, claiming to be his aunt. She was very insistent.”
The air disappears from the room. “Did she, did she take him?”
“No. Rory refused to go with her. He made quite a scene, actually.” Something almost like a laugh enters the principal’s voice. “Told her very loudly that his mom said never to go with strangers, and that she ‘smelled like lies.’ He’s quite a kid.”
“Who was she? What did she look like?”
“Blonde. Well-dressed. She left before we could call the police, but we have her on the security cameras. Ms. Holland, I think you should come in. And... you might want to bring a lawyer.”
The drive to the school is the longest seven minutes of my life.
I run two red lights. I don’t remember most of it.
There’s only the road and the roaring in my ears and the same three words on a loop, he’s safe, he’s safe, he’s safe, the principal’s voice repeating them in my memory while every cell in my body screams that safe is a thing that can change in the time it takes to cross a parking lot.
A woman came for my son today. A woman with my family’s enemies behind her walked into the one place he’s supposed to be untouchable and nearly walked back out with him in her arms.
I have spent seven years keeping him small and quiet and off the grid, and it didn’t matter. They found him anyway.
Nick meets me at the school. The call from the car was barely words, mostly panic and broken pieces of sentences, but he dropped a client mid-meeting and beat me there.
Rory is in the principal’s office, eating animal crackers like nothing happened. When he sees me in the doorway, his face lights up and he waves.
“Mom! I didn’t go with the stranger! Just like you said!”
The knees hit the floor before conscious thought kicks in, arms wrapping around him so hard he squeaks.
“You did so good, baby. You did exactly right.”
“She said she was my aunt. But I don’t have an aunt. Grace is my aunt and she doesn’t look like that.” His face scrunches with the memory. “She was mean. She grabbed my arm really hard. I bit her.”
Pulling back to look at him. “You bit her?”
“She wouldn’t let go! You said if someone grabs you and won’t let go, you fight.” He shows his teeth proudly, a tiny warrior displaying his weapons. “I fight good.”
“You fight well,” the correction comes automatically, followed by a laugh that’s half tears. “Yes. Yes, you fight very well.”
The security footage shows everything.
A blonde woman, not Brittany, but someone who could be her sister, presenting paperwork at the front desk.
The school secretary hesitating, asking questions, clearly suspicious.
The woman getting impatient, insisting, her body language shifting from polite to aggressive.
Finally pushing past the desk, heading toward the classrooms, reaching for Rory’s arm when she finds him.
And Rory, tiny, fierce, magnificent Rory, screaming “STRANGER DANGER” at the top of his lungs, sinking his teeth into her hand, and running straight to his teacher while the woman clutches her bleeding fingers.
The woman fled. The school went into lockdown. By the time they sorted everything out, she was gone.
“The paperwork was good,” Principal Vega says, sliding the documents across her desk. “Professional. Whoever made it knew what they were doing.”
Nick’s jaw is tight as he reaches for the papers. His eyes scan them, and his face goes darker by the second.
“This has my family’s lawyer’s letterhead on it,” he says quietly. “The one my parents use.”
Nausea rises fast and bitter. “Your parents did this?”
“Or someone with access to their resources.” He looks up, meets my eyes. “This wasn’t Brittany acting alone. This was planned. Funded. Professional.”
“I want to press charges.” The words tumble out, desperate. “I want a restraining order. I want...”
“We’ll do all of it.” Nick’s hand finds mine, warm and steady. “But first, we need to get Rory somewhere safe. My apartment. It has security, doormen, cameras. They can’t get to him there.”
“I can’t just. I have work, he has school...”
“Jo.” His voice is gentle but firm. “They tried to take your son. Nothing else matters right now.”
Looking at Rory, still eating animal crackers, chattering to the secretary about his bite technique, completely oblivious to how close he came to being taken by his own grandparents, and my chest goes tight and certain. The fear hardens into resolve. The kind that will do whatever it takes.
“Okay.” The whisper feels like surrender and declaration all at once. “Okay.”
The rest of the day disappears into lawyers and police.
The detective who takes the report is blunt with me, which I appreciate.
The woman kept her face turned from most of the cameras, but not all of them.
And my son left a clean set of teeth marks in her hand deep enough to need stitches.
People with bites like that turn up at urgent cares, the detective says.
They always think no one’s looking. For the first time all day, I let myself feel something other than terror.
The forged custody papers stay on the desk between us, the Anderson family lawyer’s letterhead at the top like a signature.
Everyone in the room knows what it means.
Someone with access to that office, that letterhead, that kind of money, sent a stranger to take a seven-year-old.
This wasn’t a tantrum. This was planned and paid for.
That night, in Nick’s apartment, where he has insisted we stay until the woman is in custody, tucking Rory into the guest room bed takes longer than usual.
The place is all clean lines and floor-to-ceiling windows and a security system that would make a bank jealous, and for one night, at least, I let myself believe the locks are enough.
He’s wired from the excitement, chattering about his “adventure” and how the other kids at school are going to think he’s so cool.
“And then I bit her SO hard, Mom, you should have seen her face...”
“I know, baby. You were very brave.” Smoothing the blankets, trying to keep my voice steady. “Now it’s time to sleep.”
“Mom?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“Are the bad people going to come back?”
The question is a punch to the chest. He’s seven years old. He shouldn’t have to ask questions like that. He shouldn’t have to worry about bad people coming for him.
“No.” The word comes out fierce, certain. “Nick and I are going to make sure they never bother you again.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
He’s quiet for a moment, processing this the way he processes everything, thoughtfully, completely. Then: “I’m glad Nick is here. He makes you smile. You didn’t smile much before.”
The tears threaten, but they stay contained. “Get some sleep, okay?”
“Okay. Love you, Mom.”
“Love you too, baby. More than anything.”
I don’t leave right away. I stand in the doorway and watch him breathe, the way I did when he was small, and a memory I keep buried claws its way up.
He was eighteen months old. A fever that wouldn’t break, a hundred and four and climbing, in a fourth-floor walk-up with a radiator that worked only when it felt like it.
No money for a cab. No husband. My mother an ocean away on the other side of the world, and too much pride in me yet to pick up the phone and let her hear how far under I was going.
Just me and a screaming, burning baby at three in the morning and a nurse on a hotline telling me to keep him cool and watch his breathing and bring him in if his lips changed color.
I sat on the bathroom floor with him against my chest and the cold tap running and I cried so hard I couldn’t see.
And somewhere in that endless night a thought slid in, quiet and reasonable and obscene.
You could call them. You could hand him to people with money and help and sleep. You could stop.
I didn’t stop. I never once stopped. I held my son through the fever and through the morning and through every hard year that came after, and I built us a whole life out of nothing with my own two hands.
And tonight a stranger walked into his school with a forged piece of paper and tried to carry him out of it.
Not again. Never again. Whatever it costs me.
The kiss on his forehead lingers longer than usual. Then the door closes softly, and the hallway stretches ahead, and Nick is waiting in the living room.
He’s standing at the window, staring out at the city, a drink in his hand that he hasn’t touched. The lights of Manhattan glitter below like scattered diamonds, beautiful and cold.
“This is my fault,” he says without turning around.
“No...”
“My family. My parents.” His voice is rough. “They did this because of me. Because I chose you.”
“Nick...”
“I should have seen it coming. I should have protected him better...”
“You did protect him.” Crossing the room, taking the drink from his hand, setting it aside on the windowsill. “You got us out of that apartment. You hired lawyers. You’ve been fighting for us since day one.”
“It’s not enough.”
“It’s everything.” Taking his face in my hands, making him look at me. “Rory is safe because of you. Because you were there. Because you believed me when no one else did.”
“Jo...”
“I love you.”
The words come out before I consciously decide to say them. They hang in the air between us, raw and real and terrifying.
“I love you, and I’m terrified, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know I don’t want to face it without you.”
He stares at me. His whole face changes. Wonder, maybe, or disbelief. “Tell me you mean that.”
“I love you.”
He kisses me. Desperate, consuming, like I’m the only thing keeping him from drowning in all of this.
“I love you too,” he says against my mouth. “God, I love you too.”
The couch is closer than the bedroom, and waiting feels impossible. The need is too sharp, too urgent, two people clinging to each other in the dark, finding comfort in the only way that makes sense right now.
It’s not slow. It’s not tender. It’s frantic, desperate, clothes pushed aside rather than removed, his mouth on my throat and my hands in his hair and everything else fading away until there’s nothing but this, nothing but him.
After, tangled together on the leather cushions, my fingers trace patterns on his chest. His heartbeat is steady under my palm, grounding.
“What happens now?” The question comes out barely above a whisper.
“Now we fight.” His arm tightens around me. “We drag all of it into the light. What he stole. What he just tried to do to Rory. Every ugly piece of it. My parents want a war? Fine. I’ll give them one they’ll never forget.”
“And if we lose?”
“We won’t.” He kisses my hair, my forehead, the corner of my mouth. “We won’t, Jo. I won’t let them take anything else from you. Not ever.”
Believing him feels dangerous. Believing anyone feels dangerous, after everything. But lying here in his arms, with the city glittering outside and my son safe in the next room, the belief comes anyway.
For the first time in years, someone is fighting alongside me instead of against me.
They catch her four days later.
It happens exactly the way the detective said it would.
An urgent care two towns over flags a deep bite wound on a woman’s hand, the description matches, and within hours she’s in an interview room trading names for a lighter charge.
She doesn’t know much. But she knows who paid her, and she knows whose lawyer’s office the documents came out of, and the thread she gives them runs straight back into the Anderson family, straight toward Matthias and the custody suit he filed in the daylight while he arranged this in the dark.
She’s charged. A restraining order goes through that afternoon.
It’s the first time in this entire nightmare that a door has closed on the right side.
We go home after that. But home isn’t the same place we left.
I have three new locks installed before the week is out, and a chain, and a camera at the door that pings my phone.
I check them twice every night, then a third time.
Rory wakes screaming twice that first week, sweat-soaked and shaking, certain the mean lady is in his closet, and I lie on the floor of his room until he falls back asleep and then I don’t sleep at all.
The fear doesn’t leave when the danger does.
It just moves in, quiet and permanent, and rearranges the furniture.
But we’re home. He’s in his own bed with Professor Chomps under his chin. And somewhere across the city, for the first time, someone is in a cell because of what they tried to do to my son.
It isn’t enough. Not nearly.
But it’s a start.