A person who had believed he could manage consequences the way he managed buildings—through design, scale, and the assumption that people would stay where he placed them.
Afterward, the hallway outside the courtroom smelled like wet wool and old paper. Lawyers moved in murmuring clusters. Somebody laughed too loudly near the elevators.
Sandra squeezed my arm once.
“You did well.”
“I’m not sure I did anything.”
“You showed up prepared,” she said. “That’s most of adulthood.”
Roz was waiting downstairs with Nora in her carrier, pink hat crooked over one eye. The second I saw my daughter, everything in me that had been held upright by adrenaline loosened.
I touched one finger to her cheek. Warm. Real. Mine.
Nathan came out of the elevator ten minutes later.
He stopped when he saw us.
For a second I thought he might try to talk about us, about regret, about second chances. Men like Nathan often mistake a crisis survived for intimacy regained.
Instead he looked at Nora, then at me, and said, “I won’t miss visits.”
I believed him.
Not because I trusted him the way I once had.
Because after all that damage, consistency was the only form of self-respect still available to him.
“Good,” I said.