Chapter 7: The Things That Came After
The petition was withdrawn at four forty-seven that afternoon.
Margaret sent me a copy of the court filing confirmation by email.
I read it sitting in my hotel room with the photograph of Leo on the nightstand and a cup of coffee I had made from the small machine on the bathroom counter.
I read it twice.
Then I set my phone down and sat quietly for a while.
The divorce filing moved quickly after that.
Julian did not contest the property designation.
He did not attempt to renegotiate.
Foss withdrew from the case entirely within the week — Margaret told me he had retained his own separate counsel, which meant the Bar inquiry David had initiated was already making itself felt.
Three weeks after the meeting on Sixth Street, I moved back into the house.
It felt strange to walk through the front door with a key that had always been mine, into rooms that had always been mine, and feel like a visitor.
I stood in the entry hall for a long moment with my bag over my shoulder and the hard-shell suitcase behind me.
Leo's drawing was still on the refrigerator.
Julian hadn't taken it down.
I don't know whether that was oversight or something else.
I chose not to think about it too hard.
I left it exactly where it was.
My sister, Renata, drove up from San Antonio that weekend.
She arrived on a Saturday morning with two bags of groceries, a casserole dish, and the no-nonsense energy of a woman who had decided that what her sister needed was not sympathy but company.
She walked in, looked around the kitchen, set the groceries on the counter, and said: "You need new dish towels.
These are depressing."
I laughed for the first time in weeks.
It came out rough and a little broken, but it was real.
Renata looked at me with careful eyes.
"There it is," she said quietly.
Then she turned back to the groceries.
She stayed for four days.
We cooked together and watched old movies and she slept in the guest room and woke up early to make coffee before I was up.
On the third morning I came downstairs to find her sitting at the kitchen table with Leo's drawing in her hands, looking at it gently.
She looked up when she heard me on the stairs.
"He was a good artist," she said.
"For four."
"He was." I sat down across from her.
"He was very serious about it.
He had a specific green he liked.
He would get upset if we used the wrong green."
Renata smiled.
She set the drawing carefully on the table between us.
"Tell me about him," she said.
"Not the hospital.
Before that.
Tell me something ordinary."
So I did.
I told her about the morning he had decided that cereal was no longer acceptable and had demanded eggs, which he then refused to eat because they were "too yellow." I told her about the fire truck he carried everywhere for three months and then abruptly abandoned in favor of a small rubber frog.
I told her about the way he said her name — *Nata* — because he couldn't manage the R.
Renata listened to all of it without interrupting.
When I stopped, she reached across the table and put her hand over mine.
"He was here," she said.
"He was really here.
Four years of really here."
My eyes filled.
I didn't fight it.
"Yes," I said.
We sat like that for a while, her hand over mine and Leo's drawing on the table between us, and the morning light coming through the kitchen window the way it always had.
It was the first time the grief felt like something I was carrying rather than something carrying me.
Chloe called once, about a month later.
I let it ring.
She left a voicemail — short, careful, no excuses.
She said she hoped I was okay.
She said she was sorry.
She said she wouldn't call again unless I wanted her to.
I sat with the voicemail for a long time.
I didn't call back.
May you like
Not then.
But I didn't delete it either.
