My father hadn’t hidden from my mother.
He had hidden from her.
The agent’s voice became ice.
“Give me the laptop.”
Then a second voice echoed from outside.
“Federal agents! Drop the weapon!”
The storage unit exploded into chaos.
Men in tactical gear flooded through the entrance.
The agent spun.
Someone tackled her.
The gun fired once into the ceiling.
Concrete dust rained down.
Then she disappeared beneath three armed officers.
I stumbled backward against the wall.
The laptop remained open.
My father’s frozen face stared from the screen.
A senior agent approached me.
“You okay?”
I couldn’t answer.
My father was alive.
My mother was innocent.
And nothing I had believed for the last week was true.
The senior agent picked up the laptop and resumed the video.
My father’s image returned.
“Julian, if you made it this far, then they got her.”
He smiled sadly.
