Chapter 19 - What Love Has to Earn
Spring came slowly. There were hearings, statements, interviews and long afternoons when the only thing I could manage was to make Lily lunch and get us both outside. Healing didn't arrive with a court order. It arrived in small routines nobody could steal.
Ethan kept every scheduled visit. When Lily refused to talk, he sat nearby and read. When she asked him about the mansion, he didn't tell her it was a wonderful place. He said some people there had made it unsafe, and the adults were fixing that. He never blamed her for being afraid.
One day she asked why he had the same eyes she did.
He glanced at me. We'd talked about what to say, and we told her in words she could understand: Ethan was her father, and he hadn't known where she was when she was a baby. He was learning how to be in her life now.
Lily thought hard, then held out her rabbit. "Bunny can stay with you for one song."
It was the most trust she knew how to give. Ethan accepted it as if she'd handed him the world.
I returned to Columbia to discuss finishing my degree. The department reviewed the circumstances around my withdrawal and agreed to restore the credits that had been improperly jeopardized. I still had work to do. That felt good. I wanted a future I'd built, not one another person purchased for me.
Celia called on a rainy Thursday with news from the criminal cases. Pike had entered a plea related to the intimidation and obstruction offenses and was cooperating on the killing. Prosecutors were preparing additional charges based on corroborating evidence. Victoria's attorneys were discussing a plea on her charges; the protection order remained in place.
Nothing could return Malcolm or erase Lily's fall. But the people who'd treated our lives as paperwork were finally facing consequences.
May you like
That evening, a small envelope arrived from Ethan. Inside wasn't money. It was the piano teacher's card Lily had asked him to find.
On the back he had written, ONLY IF ROSA AND LILY WANT TO.
