“And now?”
“Now I think about him the way you think about a storm that passed a long time ago. I remember it happened. I remember how loud it was. But I’m not standing in it anymore.”
Lauren was quiet.
“Vanessa sent me a message last week,” she said finally.
I looked at her in surprise.
“She said she was sorry. For her part in it. She said she’s in counseling now, and she’s figuring out a lot of things about why she believed him so easily. She said to tell you thank you.”
“Thank me for what?”
“She said that day in your yard, when you told her she didn’t need you to tell her what it meant. She said nobody had ever trusted her to figure something out for herself before. She said it was the first time she felt like she was allowed to believe her own eyes.”
