On the way, Matthew left messages.
“Mom, this is ridiculous.”
“I am going to call security.”
“Lily is crying because of you.”
That was the one that almost made me turn back.
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Lily.
My baby girl.
My eight-year-old granddaughter, with her crooked braids and her colored pencils, had risked something to put that paper in my hand.
I couldn’t fail her.
I called my lifelong neighbor, Nancy, from next door.
She answered with the voice of an interrupted nap.
“Helena, weren’t you on your way to Paris?”
“Nancy, I need you to look at my house from your window. Is anyone there?”
There was silence.
Then I heard a window blind move.
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“There is a black car outside. And two men at your gate.”
The back of my neck went cold.
“Matthew?”
“No. It is not him. They are taking out boxes.”
I closed my eyes.
The house in Brooklyn.
The house where Anthony and I lived for thirty-seven years.
The house where Matthew learned to ride a bicycle in the hallway, where Lily made her first drawing on my kitchen wall, where I kept my husband’s letters in a cookie tin.
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“Nancy, call your nephew.”
“The one in the police department?”
“No. The lawyer.”
“What did you do, woman?”
I looked at Lily’s paper in my hand.
“I think I finally woke up.”
I didn’t go straight to the house.
Halfway there, I asked the taxi driver to drop me off in front of an old-fashioned diner in Brooklyn, one of those places where they still sell hot buttered toast and coffee at any hour.
I went in, ordered water, and called a person I hadn’t called in years: Sarah Jenkins, my husband’s lawyer before he died.
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Sarah answered dryly, as always.
“Mrs. Barbosa.”
“My son is taking me to France against my will.”
There was no surprise in her voice.
Only attention.
“Where are you?”
“In a diner. Park Slope.”
“Do not go to your house alone.”
“There are already men taking out boxes.”
