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All of us went down to the courthouse for Brandi’s hearing. In accordance with her confession, she formally pleaded guilty. All that was left was the sentencing hearing. In the state of Florida, First Degree Arson was punishable by up to thirty years in prison. Thinking about my sister rotting behind bars for that long made me want to curl up in a ball and cry.
Kyle, her husband, spoke first. He testified that Brandi was a loving woman who was active in her community: she volunteered for the Jacksonville food bank, played piano at church, and ran her neighborhood’s yearly bake sale. He spoke about how they were trying to start a family.
I took the stand after that. I explained to the judge our history with that house, and our mother’s abuse. “She didn’t do this for the money,” I explained. “She did it to remove the last remaining piece of a terrible childhood.”
Two other people I didn’t know spoke on her behalf. A neighbor of Brandi’s up in Jacksonville, and the priest from their church. The judge nodded solemnly throughout their testimony. He looked unconvinced that Brandi deserved anything less than the maximum sentence.
Just when I thought all the witnesses had spoken, Jack Franco stood up next to me and took the stand. Mateo and Liam glanced at me—they looked equally confused.
“My name is Jack Franco, and I’ve known Brandi and her sister since they were eleven years old.”
I watched in shock as Jack explained growing up as our neighbor. The abuse he witnessed our mother give us on a daily basis. Verbal threats. The insistence that she should have aborted both of us. Countless tantrums and tirades, throwing our pillows and bedsheets onto the front lawn and threatening to kick us out of the house. He even mentioned one incident that I had forgotten about until that moment: on trash pickup day, our mother carried a box of our toys outside and dumped it directly into the garbage truck. The incident that had set her off? Brandi had stayed late after school to help one of her classmates with her homework. She was five minutes late for dinner.
“She called,” I whispered to Liam next to me. “She left mother a voicemail to let her know about it. But that wasn’t good enough. Nothing ever was. She was always like a bomb that might go off at any moment.”
Liam laced his fingers into mine and squeezed tightly.
“I agree with what Alyssa Ford said earlier,” Jack said to those gathered in the courtroom. “Brandi Ford did not commit this crime for money. She did it to close a wound. I know that to be the truth.”
“Thank you for your testimony, Mr. Franco,” the judge said. “Do you have anything else to add before you are dismissed?”
“Yes, your honor,” Jack said. “I’m a Fire Engineer at Station Seven here in Clearwater. It was my team that arrived on the scene of the fire in question.”
He got up and left the stand. The judge, who had remained stoic and unreadable to this point, now looked shaken.
Out of a possible thirty year maximum, the judge ended up giving my sister six months. Brandi burst into tears, but they were tears of relief. Thirty years was a lifetime, but six months was manageable.
We were allowed to say goodbye to her before the bailiff took her away. We shared a few hugs, and a lot more tears.
“Thank you for what you said,” Brandi told Jack. “It was your testimony that swayed him.”
“I only told the truth,” he replied while hugging Brandi. “Your mother was… I don’t even want to say the word I’m thinking of.”
“I promise you: we’ve thought it before,” I said, joining in their hug. “But it doesn’t matter. Our mother can’t hurt us anymore.”
Brandi was nodding and smiling through her tears. “I refuse to allow her to affect me. From this point forward, we have a fresh start.”
A fresh start, I thought as I said goodbye. I like the sound of that.
*
Two weeks later, I landed at LaGuardia Airport. I wasn’t alone—Jack had insisted on coming with me.
And Liam and Mateo. Even though the three of them were doing a good job of sharing me without jealousy, they weren’t going to let Jack show them up.
We were there to pack up all my things, but Jack and Mateo had never been to the city, so we turned it into a long weekend. I took them to Times Square, and then on a boat tour around Liberty Island. For lunch, I treated them to my favorite pizza joint. It was a hole-in-the-wall place, accessible through a narrow alley and with only enough room inside for two tables. It was old and the lights were a little too bright, but the pizza was cheap and tasted exactly how I remembered it.
“Yeah, all right,” Jack admitted. “This pizza is legit.”
“Not bad, I guess,” Liam said. He was on his fourth slice already, while the rest of us were on our second.
“I want to marry this pizza,” Mateo said passionately while cradling a slice in both hands. “And then, on our pizza wedding night, I will make delicious love to it.”
“You have to pay extra for that kind of topping,” Jack said.
All four of us laughed.
The owner, a shriveled Italian man named Freddie who looked like he was a hundred years old, scoffed loudly from the kitchen. “You do not play with the pizza. You eat the pizza. Eh?”
