I stood there on the courthouse steps and I felt the thing I’d been afraid I would feel, which was nothing. No rage. No relief. Just tired, in my knees and my back and behind my eyes.
So I told her the truth, which was the only thing I had.
A NOTE FROM BIKERS BYTE
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I said, “I counted the days.”
She didn’t ask what I meant. She reached into her purse and took out a spiral notebook, the cheap kind, seventy pages, and held it out to me with both hands.
She said, “So did I.”
I opened it later that night in a motel room the Project paid for, sitting on the end of a bed with the TV off.
Every page was dates. Her handwriting, round and careful, getting worse over the years the same way mine had. April 11, 2003, and then every April 11 after it, and next to each one a single line.
