Something in my voice must have gotten through because he actually stopped talking. He stared at me for a long moment and then walked back to his car without another word. My mother called me that evening. She said my husband had contacted her claiming I’d had some kind of breakdown and kicked him out for no reason.
She suggested marriage counseling. She reminded me how hard it was to be a single parent and how lonely I’d been before I met him. I felt the old guilt rising up in my chest, the fear that maybe I was overreacting, the worry that I was making a terrible mistake. Then I remembered Lily’s crumpled face when he told her to leave. I told my mother she didn’t have all the information and I needed her to trust my judgment on this. She went quiet.
Then she said she hoped I knew what I was doing and hung up. The conversation left me feeling shaky and uncertain. I called Rachel and told her what happened. She reminded me that my mother hadn’t seen what I’d seen and she didn’t know how Lily had been suffering. That helped more than I expected. Victoria had assigned a parallegal named Liam to help with my case.