Spud stopped packing and went to the bedroom that his mother had used as her office. It was little more than a storage room with a desk in the corner, but on the desk was her computer. He fired it up.

Spud had five hundred thousand dollars sitting in a bank account in St. Paul. But he had his crypto account that floated in the ether. He could get to his crypto money from almost any computer in the world. How much crypto could he buy with five hundred grand? Reed had waited for two days to hear from Spud. He could wait a little longer.

As he converted his mother’s cash into digital code, he thought about Pip. He was in danger with Reed, Spud just knew it. Reed had had his son for a little over a week and already was abusing him. With this money, Spud really could take Pip. They could settle anywhere in the world. Everything was coming into focus.

He shut the computer down and went to his bedroom to finish packing his duffel, placing the toy car he had bought for Pip on top of his clothing. He smiled as he imagined handing the car to Pip—the joy on the boy’s face! Then he zipped the duffel shut and walked downstairs.

In the garage, Spud tossed his bag into the backseat of his car. But before he left, he searched the garage for the lock-blade knife that his father’d had, the one he’d used when they went fishing together. Spud remembered it being in his father’s tackle box, and he was pretty sure the tackle box had been stored in the rafters of the garage, out of reach of his mother.

Spud lifted himself up into the exposed rafters where a couple sheets of plywood had been laid down as a makeshift floor to hold boxes. Dust lay thick on the relics of Spud’s past: board games he had forgotten about, suitcases left to rot by a woman who found no adventure in the world outside. Christmas ornaments he remembered from those years before his father died, when they did more than the bare minimum to celebrate.

Spud found the tackle box and opened it, and what he saw nearly brought him to tears. It was a half-eaten bag of Beer Nuts. He remembered eating those with his father on their last fishing trip. They had passed the bag between them and would have eaten them all, but Spud had caught a fish, a northern pike.

Spud picked up the bag and pressed it to his face as though it held the very soul of his father. He would buy Beer Nuts for Pip. He would take him fishing and do those things that Reed would not do—that Spud’s mother did not do. He would love the boy.

Spud put the bag of nuts into his shirt pocket and turned his attention back to the tackle box. There, in the bottom, lay the knife, a bit tarnished but functional. He opened it a few times to work the rust out of the hinge and then slipped it into his pants pocket. Sometimes plans change, he thought to himself.