“Well?” he said. “Do I need to worry about the basement?”
“No basement for that one,” I said. “That one, you can keep.”
He laughed, and hugged me, and for a moment I held my whole heart in my arms in the doorway of the house I’d cleaned for a monster and now got to fill with someone worthy.
They tried to take my son.
A stranger with a stolen name and a practiced smile walked into my kitchen and tried to walk out with my boy’s heart and his money and his future.
He forgot one thing.
Between a con man and a nineteen-year-old’s trusting heart, there is a mother who cleaned the house, made the pot roast, set out the good dishes —
May you like
and never, not for one second, stopped watching the door.
THE END
