“Greg,” I said, my voice dead and flat. “The police are here. They just broke the lock on the yellow shed. They are down in the crawl space with Marcus.”

There was a long, terrible silence on the other end of the line. No excuses. No explanations. Just the sound of Greg’s heavy breathing.

“I’m coming home,” he whispered, and then the line went dead.

He didn’t make it to Lansing. He was arrested two hours later at a state trooper checkpoint on I-96, driving back toward Grand Rapids.

Marcus was found hiding in a local motel near the highway, having fled through the crawl space’s rear ventilation grate before the police could secure the perimeter. They both went to jail that night.

That was 8 months ago.

I sold the yellow house on Oak Street for $320,000. I couldn’t spend another night in a place where the floors felt like they were breathing. I took the money, packed up Toby’s things, and moved us to a small, bright apartment on the third floor of a brick building in town.

No basement. No crawl space. Just solid concrete floors beneath our feet.

Greg is currently serving a sentence for harboring a federal fugitive and conspiracy. Our divorce was finalized last month. I didn’t ask for alimony; I just wanted my name removed from his life forever.

Yesterday, Toby and I were sitting at our new dining table, eating lunch. The sun was streaming through the big glass windows, making the room feel warm and safe.

Toby slid a new drawing across the table to me. It was our new apartment building, colored in bright blue crayon. There were only two stick figures, holding hands in the sunshine, with big smiles drawn on their faces.

“Do you like it, Mom?” he asked, his mouth full of peanut butter sandwich.

I looked at the drawing, and for the first time in a very long time, I felt like I could finally draw a deep, clean breath.

“I love it, sweetie,” I said, taping it to the refrigerator door. “It’s absolutely perfect.”