All of that had been bothering me for days.
And now my husband was taking me on a plane without telling me our destination.
“Do the children know about this?” I asked as we drove to the airport.
Robert kept his eyes on the road.
“Yes.”
That one word made my stomach tighten.
At the airport, he checked us in, collected our boarding passes, and guided me toward the departure gate. I tried asking him several more times where we were going, but he only smiled faintly and told me to be patient.
Eventually, we boarded. The plane took off, and I watched our city disappear beneath the clouds. For the first twenty
minutes, Robert barely spoke. Then, somewhere over the countryside, he reached for my hand. His fingers were cold.
He looked directly into my eyes and whispered:
“Mary, after today, you’ll never see your children again.”
For a moment, I thought I had misheard him.
