I didn't sleep. I want to say barely, because barely implies some. But barely would be a lie and I'm too tired for lies, which is ironic because lying requires less energy than truth and I have none of either.
I lay in bed with the CPS text glowing on my phone like a tumor on an X-ray — something you can't stop looking at even though looking doesn't change it.
Colt called the number at seven. There was a professional female voice. The frequency of someone trained to deliver devastating information in a tone so neutral it could be mistaken for kindness.
Anonymous complaint filed regarding the Hill household. Caseworker to be scheduled. No, she couldn't disclose the complaint's nature. No, she couldn't identify the complainant. Yes, the visit was mandatory.
Colt thanked her. Because Colt McKenna thanks people even when they're dismantling his life, because manners are the last wall standing when everything else has been breached.
Phone on the table between us. A grenade with the pin pulled, sitting next to the salt shaker like it belonged there, like every kitchen table in America has a phone with a CPS callback number in its recent calls.
Kameron against the counter with arms crossed. The posture of a man preparing for a fight but not yet sure which direction to swing.
"Who filed it?"
"There's only one person with the motive and the legal language to write a complaint like that."
Colt looked at both of us. "My father doesn't file complaints. He hires people who file complaints. The language will be precise, designed to trigger mandatory investigation. It'll reference household structure, financial instability, the number of adults in the home. Every detail he gathered during that visit — every room Catherine complimented, every crack she cataloged — was research."
"Can we prove it?"
"Anonymous complaints are protected. You don't need to attach your name to a weapon if the weapon is the system itself."
Someone had filed paperwork questioning whether my children were safe in my home.
My children — the ones I'd carried alone and raised alone for six years, fed and bathed and worried over in the consuming way that turns your entire nervous system into a monitoring device calibrated to three small heartbeats.
I wanted to scream. Instead I made coffee. Because that's what you do when the world is ending at seven-fifteen on a Wednesday — you make coffee, because the ritual is the only thing between you and collapse.
Stella came Saturday. Twenty weeks, showing properly. She'd started taking the triplets Saturday mornings — not asking, arriving. Granola bars and a plan and the cheerful authority of a woman who'd decided this was happening.
"I don't need — "
"You carried triplets alone for six years. Let someone carry your groceries for two hours."
Zero room for the martyrdom mothers specialize in — refusing help because accepting feels like admitting we can't do everything, even though we can't, and the pretending is killing us faster than the work.
The triplets went willingly. Lily because Stella promised the park.
Luke because Stella's truck was bigger and he respected vehicular superiority.
Levi because he'd been watching me with those blue eyes for two weeks and had calculated, with quiet precision, that his mother needed the house empty for reasons he didn't understand but respected.
Two hours of silence. Feet up was doctor's orders and I did absolutely nothing. The nothing of a brain that won't stop running scenarios even when the body's been ordered to stop.
Ryan came after his shift. Still in uniform — straight from the station, urgent enough to skip the shower that marked the transition between Sheriff Ryan and Brother Ryan.
I told him. His face did the thing it does — the stillness people mistake for calm but is actually deafening noise held perfectly still.
"Do you need a lawyer?"
"I don't know." My voice sounded small. I hated it. "Do I?"
"Get one now, before the visit." Elbows on knees, giving professional advice to his sister and wishing he didn't have to.
"CPS has procedures with legal frameworks. You need someone who knows the system sitting next to you when that caseworker walks through your door. Not because you've done anything wrong — because the person who filed has resources, and resources buy better narratives."
Resources buy better narratives. The sentence stayed in my kitchen, heavy and true and unfixable by anything as small as innocence.
That night in Hank's room tremors refusing to negotiate, words arriving wrong or not at all. More bad days than good lately. The ratio tilting toward the side nobody wanted to acknowledge was heavier.
I read from his crossword book. Not the clues — the answers. His hands couldn't hold the pen. His eyes couldn't track the grid.
The man who'd spent forty years filling in crosswords with the mechanical joy of proving his brain still worked — Dad at the kitchen table every Sunday, pen in hand, coffee going cold because the puzzle mattered more than the temperature — was watching his daughter read answers to puzzles he couldn't solve.
He fell asleep mid-sentence. Head tilted, mouth open, the tremor finally stilling because sleep was the only state where his body stopped fighting itself. I watched him breathe — shallow, measured, the respiratory equivalent of our finances. Just enough. Just barely.
I thought about cost. Fourteen hundred monthly in prescriptions. The oxygen concentrator. The wheelchair. The supplements his stomach tolerated reluctantly. The Fort Worth trips.
The care Jolene provided with gentleness and the unspoken understanding that she was helping a dying man in exchange for proximity to the son she'd abandoned.
And the other cost. The alternative living in the drawer I never opened — the one labeled with words I couldn't say because saying them makes the math real, and the math is the kind that ends with an empty chair at a kitchen table and a crossword book nobody picks up again.
I closed the book and kissed his forehead. Left the light on because he'd started waking in the dark not knowing where he was, and light helped him find his way back to a life shrinking around him like a sweater in hot water — same shape, smaller every day.
In the hallway I pressed my back against the wall. Hand on my belly.
Thirty weeks, CPS was coming, father was dying, and blood pressure was rising with money falling.
"We're fine," I whispered to the baby, to the hallway, to no one. The most necessary lie. The only one I had left.