“Yes,” I say. “Not because bad things happened. And not because it was fair. We won because he doesn’t get to decide what our life is now.”
She thinks about that. “So winning is not forgetting.”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
I smooth her hair back from her forehead.
“Getting to live honestly after someone tried to scare you out of it.”
She seems satisfied. “Okay.”
Then, sleepier: “Can Jury be vice president?”
“Absolutely.”
She closes her eyes.
I linger there a little longer, watching her breathe. The room is full of ordinary things: library books, one lost sock, moonlight on the pale blue wall, the faint smell of strawberry shampoo. Nothing grand. Nothing dramatic. Just quiet evidence of a life that belongs to itself again.
Downstairs, I turn off the kitchen lights one by one. I pause at the back door and look out at the yard where the marigolds still hold their color in the dark, little suns that learned how to bloom after burial.
I think of the woman I was on the cliff of denial, arranging ugly truths into harmless shapes because the alternative felt impossible.
I do not despise her.
But she is gone.