Chapter 10: What Came After
Chloe Marsh came home on a Friday.
I wasn't there.
I didn't need to be.
But Voss called me that afternoon and said simply, "She's home," and I had to sit down on the back porch steps and stay there for a while.
Lily was in the yard, kicking a soccer ball against the fence.
She'd been staying with me for two weeks by then.
Sarah had asked if it was all right.
I'd said yes before she finished the sentence.
"Auntie Dana," Lily called.
"Watch."
She pulled back and kicked the ball hard.
It bounced off the fence post at an angle she hadn't intended, ricocheted sideways, and knocked over a flowerpot.
She looked at the pot.
She looked at me.
"That was not what I was planning," she said.
"I could tell," I said.
She picked up the pot, set it back, and retrieved the ball.
She stood there for a moment, holding it.
"Is the other girl okay?" she asked.
"The one whose name was on the sleeping bag."
I looked at her.
"How did you know?"
"I heard you on the phone.
You said 'she's home' and then you sat down." She bounced the ball once.
"So I figured."
"She's home," I said.
"She's with her family."
Lily nodded slowly.
She set the ball down and came and sat next to me on the porch steps.
She was quiet for a moment.
"I was really scared," she said.
"That night.
In the bathroom.
I sat on the floor and I put my back against the door and I counted the tiles on the ceiling."
"How many were there?"
"Forty-three.
I counted twice to make sure." She looked at her hands.
"I kept thinking, someone will come.
Someone will know something is wrong." She paused.
"And then you came."
I put my arm around her.
"I'll always come," I said.
She leaned into me.
The afternoon was warm, the kind of ordinary warm that asks nothing of you.
Martin Hale was formally indicted on federal charges six weeks later.
The proceedings were covered briefly in the national news and at length in the local paper.
His name came off the donor wall of one school the following month.
The second school took three months and a petition signed by four hundred parents.
Brenda Cole accepted a plea agreement.
She would not see the outside of a prison for eleven years.
Gerald Cole filed for divorce within the week.
He sold the house on Sycamore Crescent and moved away.
Nobody on the street seemed surprised.
Patricia Elms received a reduced sentence in exchange for her full cooperation.
She served eight months.
I don't know where she is now.
I think about her sometimes — about the forty-seven pages she wrote, and the eight months she spent building a record while a man held her past over her head like a blade.
I don't know what to feel about Patricia Elms.
I've stopped trying to decide.
The four additional individuals named in her statement were charged in two separate jurisdictions.
One case is still ongoing.
The sitting official resigned before charges were formally filed.
His resignation statement cited a desire to spend more time with his family.
Lily went back to school in September.
She asked to switch to a different class, and the school arranged it without question.
She made a new friend named Rosie who is obsessed with horses.
Lily has no interest in horses.
She goes along with it anyway.
She still stays at my place some weekends.
She has a drawer in the guest room now, with her things in it.
She put a sticker on the drawer — a small yellow sun — so she would know which one was hers.
I didn't tell her to do that.
She just did it.
I found it one morning when I was putting away clean towels.
I stood there looking at that small yellow sun for longer than made any sense.
Then I closed the drawer carefully, so the sticker wouldn't peel, and went to make breakfast.
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*Some of the most important moments happen in the most ordinary places — a driveway, a bathroom floor, a back porch step.
Sometimes the only thing standing between a child and the worst possible outcome is one adult who decides not to drive away.*
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