Chapter 5 - The Morning They Came for Him
Sibil arrived before the deputy did.
She swept through my front door in a pressed blouse and pearl earrings, carrying indignation like perfume. “Richard said you’ve become hysterical,” she said. “Where is Tyler? I’m taking him back until you calm down.” That sentence would once have knocked the air out of me. That morning, it simply made me cold. I stood in the foyer and said, “You are not taking my son anywhere.” She gave me a pitying smile. “You see? This is exactly the instability I warned Richard about.”
Richard came down the stairs with his overnight bag in one hand and a practiced expression of concern on his face, clearly expecting to leave with Tyler under the pretext of giving me “space.” He stopped when he saw the envelope in my hand. “What’s that?” he asked. Before I could answer, there was a knock at the door. A deputy in Davidson County uniform stepped inside, glanced at the names Leah had provided, and said, “Richard Cross?” The color drained from Richard’s face. Sibil turned on him. “What did you do?”
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The deputy served him in my foyer. Emergency temporary sole custody to Caroline Cross. No removal of the child from the marital residence. No unsupervised contact pending hearing. No contact between Sibil Cross and Tyler without court approval. Sibil actually laughed in disbelief. “On what grounds?” she snapped. I lifted Tyler’s iPad from the console table where I had placed it deliberately. “On the grounds that the two of you spent two weeks coaching a nine-year-old to lie about his mother.” The deputy’s expression shifted almost imperceptibly. He had not heard the details until then.
Tyler appeared at the top of the stairs in his socks, holding the banister with one hand. Richard looked up at him and did the worst thing he could have done. He said, softly, “Buddy, tell them you misunderstood.” Tyler’s whole body went rigid. I opened my arms. “Come here.” He came down and crossed straight into me. Then, with his face pressed against my shoulder, he whispered loudly enough for everyone in the foyer to hear, “I didn’t misunderstand. Grandma said if I told you, you’d never see me again.” Sibil’s mouth opened and closed without sound. The deputy looked at Leah’s order again, then back at Richard. “Sir,” he said, “you need to collect only what you need for the next seventy-two hours and leave the residence.”
