Chapter 9
I had never testified in court before.
The morning of Victoria’s hearing, I stood outside the building trying to slow my breathing. My mother held my coat while I adjusted the sleeve over my healed shoulder.
Nathan came up the steps alone.
“Lily’s with Daniel’s sister,” he said. “She’s making a birthday card for your mother.”
“She thinks every card needs a bear.”
“Most cards do.”
I smiled. It helped me walk inside.
Victoria sat beside her lawyer. She wore a plain dark dress. She looked at me once, then lowered her eyes.
I told the court what happened in the kitchen. I described Lily arriving, Victoria’s anger, the first swing, and Nathan entering before Victoria could swing again.
When I reached the part where I covered Lily, my voice caught.
I looked at my mother. She nodded.
I finished.
Nathan testified to what he saw. The hospital records and the stick recovered from the kitchen were admitted too. Victoria’s lawyer challenged parts of her earlier statement, then asked for a break.
Afterward, Victoria changed her plea. She admitted the assault and the threat she had made. The court imposed a sentence that included custody under its terms and a strict order barring her from contacting Lily or me.
When I stepped outside, the air felt cool against my face.
Nathan stood beside me but gave me space.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Tired.”
“That makes sense.”
“And glad she said it happened.”
He nodded. “I’m glad too.”
Charles’s case took longer. Investigators had to trace years of records, and I was asked to give another statement. Hall’s messages showed that Charles ordered the false complaint and directed people to watch Lily. The clinic payment and custody draft gave those orders a history.
He tried to blame Nathan’s father for everything that happened before his death. But the recent payments carried Charles’s authorization. Victoria’s statement supported the records.
When Charles entered a guilty plea, I sat in the courtroom with my mother. I wanted to hear it myself.
He did not look at me. That no longer mattered.
Outside, reporters crowded Nathan. They asked whether he would return to the company. He said the board had chosen a new chief executive and he supported her. He would continue helping the investigators and the people affected by the contracts he had approved.
Then he came to Lily’s birthday party.
We held it in my mother’s backyard. The bear cake tilted exactly as I had feared. Lily loved it.
Nathan hung the paper stars too low. Lily made him move every one. He did it without complaint.
My mother brought out an old photograph of me at five, missing a front tooth and grinning at the camera. Nathan held it beside Lily’s face.
“She has your smile,” he told me.
“And your stubbornness.”
Lily overheard.
“What’s stubbornness?”
“When you insist all the stars have to be exactly where you want them,” Nathan said.
“They do.”
My mother laughed so hard she had to sit down.
Later, after the guests left, Nathan helped me carry chairs inside. Lily fell asleep on the sofa wearing her birthday crown.
I watched him tuck a blanket around her.
“I missed five of these,” he said.
“You’re here for this one.”
“I know.” He looked at me. “I don’t want to spend all my time regretting what I missed. I want to know her as she is now.”
“She would like that.”
He hesitated. “And I’d like to know you again, if you want that too.”
My hands tightened around the back of a chair.
“I do,” I said. “But I’m still learning how to feel safe.”
“We can take our time.”
I believed him.
In the months that followed, we did. He picked Lily up from school twice a week. We ate dinner together when our schedules allowed. Sometimes he and I went for a walk after my mother came to stay with Lily.
We talked about ordinary things. My new job. His plans to work with a small housing nonprofit. The terrible fried dough we had eaten years earlier.
We also talked about his father. Nathan no longer tried to make every memory fit one story. Some were warm. Some were cruel. He carried both, and I let him tell me when he needed to.
One evening, he showed me an old letter his father had sent him at school. It was affectionate. Nathan folded it again after I read it.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” he said.
“You don’t have to decide tonight.”
He put it away.
The next week, Lily asked if Nathan could come with us to the fair.
“I hear the fried dough is terrible,” he told her.
May you like
“Then we should get two,” she said.
I laughed. We bought three.
