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.
Daniel’s lawyer did what Patricia had predicted.
