It is late Saturday night, nearly midnight on October 30, 2022. Jen Brotherhood waits anxiously at the window for her son, Todd, to get home. Kelly, her husband, emerges from their bedroom and assures her she needn’t worry. Todd is 18, after all. Kelly jokes that since this is the night they moved clocks back, Todd is still early.

Jen, a successful divorce lawyer, passes the time by mulling over a thorny case. Given her schedule and her husband’s schedule as a private contractor who restores vintage homes, the two are seldom at home.

She sees Todd approach the house and is aware of a shadowy man behind him. She feels an inexplicable panic: “Something is wrong” (4). She hurries outside just in time to watch her son plunge a knife into the man’s chest, a “clean, quick stab” (5). As Jen cradles the stricken man, blood everywhere, she can only stare at her son in horror.

What Todd says shocks his mother: “I had to” (7). As the police swarm the street, Jen feels “as if she had been deposited at the North Pole” (9). The police handcuff Todd. Jen feels the twin pulls of being a mother and a lawyer.