I braced myself, but I said, “Okay.”
“When you were on the floor,” he said, “and I said you were fine — did you hear me?”
“I heard you,” I said. “I couldn’t see straight, but I heard you.”
He looked down at his hands. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot in counseling. About why my first instinct was to protect myself from looking foolish instead of checking if you were okay.” He paused. “I don’t have a good answer yet. But I wanted you to know I’m not pretending it didn’t happen.”
It was not an apology, not exactly. But it was the first honest thing he had said to me in over a year, and I found that I could accept it for what it was without needing it to be more.
Patricia’s progress was slower and less convincing. She completed the required course, technically, but Susan Bell noted in her reports that Patricia’s engagement felt performative — she said the right things in structured settings and reverted quickly outside them. The ninety-day supervised period for her was extended. I did not take pleasure in that. I only felt a kind of tired relief that the system built to protect Lily was, imperfectly but genuinely, doing its job.
