Right after my husband left for his business trip, my six-year-old gripped my hand and quietly said, “Mom… we can’t go back home. This morning I heard Dad on the phone, talking about something that involves us and it didn’t sound right.” So we didn’t go back.

“Okay, tell me exactly what you heard this morning,” I said.

He leaned close until his lips brushed my ear. “I woke up early to get water and Dad was in his office on the phone,” he whispered.

“He said tonight something bad was going to happen while we were sleeping,” Toby continued.

“He said he needed to be far away so he would not be in the way anymore,” the boy finished.

The world seemed to tilt on its axis. I pulled back and searched his face for any sign of a lie.

“Are you absolutely sure about this?” I asked.

He nodded frantically. “He said people were going to take care of it and his voice sounded scary,” Toby added.

My first instinct was still denial. I wanted to tell myself it was a misunderstanding about a home renovation or a work project.

But memories surfaced uninvited like ghosts. I remembered Dominic insisting that the house and the accounts stay in his name only.

I remembered him increasing his life insurance policy last month. I thought of the late night calls he took behind locked doors.

I even remembered a phrase I overheard while half asleep. “It has to look like an accident,” he had muttered into the phone.

I stood up slowly and felt a cold chill wash over me. “Okay, I believe you,” I said.

Relief flooded Toby’s face so fast that it hurt my heart to see it. We walked to the SUV in silence.

I buckled him in with shaking hands and drove away from the airport. I did not take our usual route home.

I circled the neighborhood wide and approached our street from a back entrance. I parked on a side road where the shadows were deepest.

Our house sat there looking like a sanctuary. The porch light was on and the curtains were drawn tight.

We waited in the dark cabin of the car. Minutes passed like hours.

Then the dark van turned onto our street. It moved with a predatory slowness that made my skin crawl.

It stopped right in front of our driveway. Two men stepped out of the vehicle.

They were not wearing uniforms. One of them reached into his pocket and pulled out a key.

He unlocked our front door and the house swallowed them both. “Mom, how do they have a key?” Toby whispered.

I could not answer him because the truth was too heavy to speak. Then I smelled it through the cracked window.

The scent of gasoline drifted toward us on the night breeze. A thin line of gray smoke curled from the upstairs window.