Chapter 8: What the Morning Brought
The report was filed at nine-seventeen the following morning.
I know the exact time because Dr.
Hale sent me a message when it was done — three words: *It's been filed.* I was in the kitchen making Thomas's breakfast when my phone lit up on the counter, and I read it, and I set the phone back down, and I finished making his eggs.
Thomas sat in his high chair and ate with the focused seriousness of a child who has decided that this particular morning is going well.
He had slept through the night.
He had woken up dry-eyed and clear-faced and asked for his blue cup, which I gave him, and then he had asked for Lena, which I was, and so that was settled.
Mark came down at half past eight.
He had not slept much — I could see it in the set of his shoulders, the careful way he moved, the way he poured his coffee and stood at the counter and didn't say anything for a moment.
Then he said: "How is he?"
"Good," I said.
"He ate well."
Thomas held up a piece of egg on his spoon, showing it to his father.
"Very good," Mark said.
He sat down at the table across from his son.
He watched Thomas eat for a moment.
Then: "I spoke to my attorney last night.
After you went to bed."
"What did she say?"
"That the notebook changes things significantly.
That combined with Dr.
Hale's report and the photographic documentation, the case for supervised contact — or no contact — is strong." He wrapped both hands around his coffee mug.
"She also said I should expect Victoria's attorney to challenge the recordings."
"Dr.
Hale said the legal position wasn't clean."
"My attorney said the same thing.
But she also said it doesn't matter as much as I think, because the notebook is Victoria's own words.
In her own handwriting.
Dated." He paused.
"That's not something you can challenge."
Thomas dropped his spoon on the tray.
He looked at it.
He looked at me.
"Spoon," he said.
I picked it up and gave it back to him.
"Spoon," he confirmed.
Mark almost smiled.
It was a small thing, and it didn't quite make it all the way, but it was there.
The formal investigator arrived at eleven.
Her name was Donna Marsh, and she was a compact woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a chain around her neck and a manner that was neither warm nor cold — simply steady, the way a person gets after years of walking into difficult rooms and needing to be the most reliable thing in them.
She spoke with Mark first, in the sitting room, with the door closed.
I kept Thomas in the kitchen, where we built a tower out of his blocks and knocked it down and built it again, which he found endlessly satisfying.
When it was my turn, Mark took Thomas to the garden.
I sat across from Donna Marsh and answered every question she asked.
She asked them in a particular order — starting from the beginning, from my first day in the house, moving forward week by week.
She didn't rush.
She wrote everything down in a small notebook that was nothing like Victoria's, and she asked follow-up questions that told me she had already read Dr.
Hale's report carefully.
At one point she asked: "Was there ever a moment when you considered leaving?
Finding a different position?"
"Yes," I said.
"What stopped you?"
I thought about Thomas in the locked room.
The two hours.
The silence after the crying stopped.
"He couldn't leave," I said.
"So I didn't."
Donna Marsh wrote that down.
She was there for two hours.
When she left, she shook my hand and told me I would be contacted within five business days with next steps.
At the door she paused.
"You did the right thing," she said.
"I want you to know that.
It's not always obvious in the moment, and it's not always easy, and I want you to know."
"Thank you," I said.
She nodded once and left.
I stood in the doorway for a moment after her car pulled away, in the cold air, in the quiet of the street.
Then I went back inside to find Thomas.
He was in the garden with his father, crouched down near the edge of the path, examining something on the ground with total concentration — a leaf, a pebble, something small and interesting that only a two-year-old would find worth stopping for.
Mark was crouched beside him, looking at whatever it was too.
I watched them from the doorway.
Thomas picked the thing up — a small stone, I could see now — and held it out to his father.
Showing him.
Sharing it.
Mark took it.
Turned it over in his palm.
Said something I couldn't hear.
Thomas laughed.
It was the first time I had heard him laugh in three weeks.
I went back inside and finished the lunch I had been making, and I didn't wipe my eyes until I was facing the sink where no one could see me, and even then I was quick about it, because there was still work to do and Thomas would be hungry soon and some feelings you just carry quietly until there's a better time.
May you like
There wasn't a better time that day.
But there was lunch, and there was the stone Thomas insisted on bringing to the table and placing beside his bowl, and there was his father sitting across from him, and there was the ordinary sound of a meal being eaten in a house that was, for the first time in a long time, simply quiet.
