My phone buzzes again. The screen lights up with Dominic’s name. That’s the forty-seventh call this week. I don’t answer. I haven’t answered in three days.
“Mrs. Patterson,” the lawyer says. Her voice is gentle but firm. Professional. “Are you absolutely certain?”
My hand hovers over the line where my name belongs. The ink at the pen tip glistens under the overhead lights. I can smell the leather of these chairs, feel the cool air from the vent above me, hear the clock on the wall marking each second with a tiny click.
Four words. That’s all it took to destroy my son’s world. Four simple words that changed everything between us forever.
Hi, viewers. Kindly tell us where you’re watching from and what time it is.
Three weeks ago, I was standing in a wedding venue four hours from home, watching champagne bubbles rise in crystal glasses beneath chandeliers that looked like they belonged in a Manhattan hotel instead of a lodge off an interstate exit in Colorado. I was watching my only son laugh with his groomsmen, his tie slightly crooked the way it always got when he was excited. I was thinking about how handsome he looked, how proud his father would have been.
I didn’t know that in less than an hour he’d ask me to leave. That he’d choose a woman he’d known for two years over the mother who’d raised him alone for twenty-four. That everything I’d sacrificed would mean nothing when it mattered most.
But that’s not where this story ends. It’s where it begins. Because the next morning, when my phone rang and I saw his name flash across the screen, when I heard him say those words—“Mom, I need the property papers”—something inside me shifted. Something cold and clear and final.
I sign my name.
The pen scratches across the paper with a sound like tearing fabric.
Karin Elizabeth Patterson.
Each letter deliberate, each stroke permanent.
“And this second set,” the lawyer says, tapping another document.
I sign that one, too. Then a third. Then a fourth. My signature gets faster with each page, more confident. The lawyer witnesses each one, her own pen moving in precise, practiced strokes.
My phone buzzes again. Dominic. Call forty-eight.
“There’s one more thing,” I tell the lawyer. My voice doesn’t shake. “I want to make a phone call.”
She nods and slides her desk phone toward me. The receiver is cool against my palm as I dial the number I know by heart. It rings once, twice, three times.
“Hello?” Dominic’s voice is breathless, desperate. “Mom, is that you?”
