What I don’t remember is dropping the coffee.
One second it was there.
The next, it was spreading across the asphalt between my boots.
“Mom?”
“I’m at Baltimore Central.”
Her voice sounded small.
My mother had never sounded small.
Nancy Mercer had buried a husband, survived breast cancer, rebuilt a kitchen after a pipe burst in January, learned online banking at sixty-eight because she refused to let anyone tell her she was too old, and once chased a raccoon off her porch with a broom while wearing bedroom slippers.
She did not whisper.
She did not cry easily.
And she certainly did not call me at 2:27 in the morning.
“Why are you at a police station?”
A pause.
Then I heard her inhale.
“Ryan told them I attacked him.”
My knees weakened.
“Tell me what happened.”
“He came over around nine-thirty. He brought an apple pie.”
Even then, even with terror crawling under my skin, something about that detail lodged itself in my mind.
