“I know.”
“Are you ready for that?”
I looked at the lavender.
Chloe had been right about it.
“I’ve been ready since the morning Ava showed me that jacket,” I said.
The charges were filed on a Friday.
Vehicular manslaughter.
Obstruction of justice.
Filing a false police report.
Coercion of a minor witness.
Daniel’s name appeared in the local paper online that evening.
My sister called within the hour.
Then my neighbor.
Then a woman from Chloe’s old school who I hadn’t spoken to in three years.
I let most of the calls go to voicemail.
I called my sister back and talked for an hour.
She cried.
I didn’t, not then.
Ava sat with me in the kitchen that evening.
We ordered pizza — something we had never done together, just the two of us, without the performance of a normal family dinner.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
I thought about it honestly.
“Like something that’s been pressing on my chest for five years just moved an inch.”
“Just an inch?”
“It’s a start,” I said.
She almost smiled.
It was the first time in days.
Daniel called me once, that weekend.
I answered because Patricia had told me to document any contact.
“You’re destroying this family,” he said.
His voice was controlled, but underneath it something was fraying.
“Everything we built.
Everything I did for you after Chloe—”
“You didn’t do anything for me after Chloe,” I said.
“You managed me.
There’s a difference.”
A long silence.
“I loved her,” he said.
And for a moment — just a moment — he sounded like the man I had married.
“I know you did,” I said.
“That’s what makes it worse.”
I ended the call and sent Patricia a recording of it.
She had told me to keep my phone set to record any calls from him.
That night I went to bed at nine and slept for seven hours straight — the longest unbroken sleep I’d had in five years.
I didn’t know that was what relief felt like until I woke up in it.
The trial took four months to reach a verdict.
I will not describe every day of it.
Some of it was procedural and slow.
Some of it was brutal in the specific way that courtrooms can be brutal — clinical language wrapped around the worst moments of your life, evidence photographs, testimony delivered in flat voices about things that were anything but flat.
