“Take this,” she said. “Tell them that when I held this in the shed, I wasn’t just scared for Noah. I was scared that Daddy didn’t love us at all. Tell them he didn’t just hide Noah. He broke the part of us that feels safe.”
The parole board room was small and smelled of floor wax. Jeremy sat across from me, looking thinner, his eyes darting around the room. He tried to look remorseful, but when our eyes met, I saw the same cold calculation that had pointed the finger at me four years ago.
I didn’t read a prepared statement. I told them about Noah’s nightmares. I told them about a ten-year-old girl who spends her nights checking window locks. I told them that “good behavior” in a cell means nothing compared to the lifetime sentence of anxiety he gave his children.
Parole was denied.
When I got home, the kids were waiting on the porch. Noah was throwing a ball for our new dog—a golden retriever he’d named “Guardian.” Lily was sitting on the swing, reading.
I walked up and sat beside her. “He’s staying there, Lily. For the full five years. And after that, the restraining order is permanent.”
Lily didn’t say anything at first. She just leaned her head on my shoulder. For the first time in years, I felt her muscles actually relax. She wasn’t holding her breath anymore.
“Mom?” she whispered.
“Yes, baby?”
“Can we go to the park? The one with the big open field? I want to run where there aren’t any walls.”
As I watched my children run across that grass under the wide, afternoon sun, I realized that Jeremy hadn’t won. He had tried to bury our family, but he forgot that we were seeds. We had grown through the dark, through the floorboards, and into the light.
