“I keep thinking about how close she came to actually taking him,” Grant told me, the night the verdict came in. “If you hadn’t hit that button. If Marcus hadn’t recognized you.”
He sat across from me at our kitchen table, both twins finally asleep upstairs, the exhaustion of the trial’s final day still visible in the set of his shoulders.
“I keep replaying those two seconds,” he continued. “The gap between her lifting Elias out of the bassinet and you reaching for that panel. What if you’d been too weak to move that fast, that soon after surgery.”
“But I wasn’t,” I said. “I want you to hold onto that instead of the version where things went differently.”
He nodded slowly, though I could tell the alternate version still lingered somewhere in his mind, the way difficult near-misses tend to linger regardless of how the actual story eventually resolved.
⸻
“But I did,” I said. “And he did. I try to focus on that instead of what might have happened otherwise.”
⸻
“I don’t think I’ll ever fully forgive her,” Grant admitted. “I understand she’s my mother. I understand grief and complicated family dynamics led her somewhere terrible. I still don’t think forgiveness is required just because we share blood.”
He paused for a long moment, his eyes finding mine across the small table between us.
“I think what I actually feel is closer to grief,” he added. “Grief for the mother I thought I had, versus the one who actually showed up that afternoon.”
⸻
