“No,” I agreed quietly. “I didn’t. But I think, for Lily’s sake, I’d rather you spend the energy proving it than talking about it.”
He nodded, and for the first time since our marriage had started falling apart, I felt something close to peace standing next to him — not forgiveness exactly, not yet, but the absence of the constant, exhausting vigilance I had carried for over a year, waiting for the next accusation, the next dismissal, the next moment where my own body would be used as evidence against me.
PART 9
Winter came, and with it, the kind of ordinary life I had almost forgotten was possible. Lily turned eight in December. We had a small party — my sister, two friends from Lily’s class, Susan Bell stopping by briefly with a gift because she said she’d grown fond of “keeping an eye on the happy endings, not just the hard cases.” Daniel came for an hour, brought a telescope because Lily had gone through a sudden, fierce obsession with space, and left before the cake, respecting the boundaries we’d carefully built back into shared space.
