There were parts I wanted to make sound better.
I had to resist that.
Saying I was exhausted was true. Saying I was frightened was true. Saying I had trusted my husband was true.
Those truths did not answer every question.
The arrests didn’t restore my daughter or turn the baby in the nursery into the child I had expected to bring home. They didn’t give me nine years with Marcus back in a form I could understand.
They made it possible for the arrangement to be examined beyond our house, beyond his explanations, and beyond my wish to believe them.
I had no neat ending to offer.
I still had missing pieces. I still had the grief of learning that the daughter I thought I was caring for had not survived. I still had to face the possibility that, in a moment I could barely remember, I had accepted enough of Marcus’s plan to become part of it.
What I could do was stop preserving the lie.
That decision came too late to undo what had happened at the hospital. It came after Leo had spent nights frightened in his own home.
But it came.
When I think about those days, I return most often to two things Leo said.
At the hospital, he had leaned close to the baby and promised, “I got you.”
On the kitchen floor, he had looked up at me and said, “I told you.”
Between those sentences, he had kept trying to make himself heard. He hadn’t become a jealous child because we found that explanation convenient. He had remained the same little boy who wanted to protect his sister and didn’t know what to do with what he had seen.
I remember his dinosaur pajamas under my hands that morning. I remember loosening my arms when he said I was holding him too tightly.
For once, I listened to exactly what he was telling me.
Then I reached for the phone and made the first call.
