The corridor was long and bright, and Savannah's arm was around my shoulders before the courtroom door clicked shut behind us.
"It's done," she said, assured in a way that steadied me. She'd been steadying me since the afternoon I showed up at her office door with a split lip I'd gotten from walking into a cabinet — that was the truth, actually — and eyes that said everything my mouth couldn't. Preston never hit me. He never needed to. Savannah hadn't asked me to explain. She'd handed me a coffee, closed her office door, and said,Tell me what you need.
I gave her a jerky nod.
My hands were shaking now. Fine, rapid tremors I couldn't have stopped with a gun to my head. The composure was over. The courtroom was behind me. And my body was finally telling the truth my face had refused to.
"I need a minute."
Savannah let me go. No argument, no hovering. She understood that kind of alone — the kind where your body needs to fall apart, and your pride needs a locked door to do it behind.
I walked to the bathroom at the end of the corridor. Pushed through the door. Locked it. Gripped the sink with both hands until my knuckles went white.
One breath.
Two.
Three, and the air snagged on something in my chest — a sound, an ugly sound, the kind you muffle into your palm at three a.m. so your daughter doesn't hear. I pressed my lips together and breathed through my nose and stared at the woman in the mirror.
Blonde hair pulled back. Blue eyes ringed dark with sleepless weeks. Cheekbones sharper than they should've been because stress ate me from the inside out, and I forgot to eat back.
The woman in the mirror wasn't broken.
She looked tired. She looked stripped down to the bone.
But she looked like someone who'd walked through something that was supposed to destroy her, and hadn't let it.
I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. Straightened my spine — not because anyone was watching, but because I needed to feel it. The steel. The refusal. The part of me Preston tried to bury that kept clawing its way back up.
The parking garage smelled like exhaust and old concrete and the particular brand of despair that lives in places where people go to leave.
My car was on the third level. A white Honda Civic with eighty-seven thousand miles and a car seat in the back and everything I owned in the trunk. Three boxes. Two suitcases. A garbage bag of Maisie's toys because I'd run out of boxes and time on the same afternoon. Six years of marriage reduced to what fit in a sedan with room to spare.
It should have gutted me.
It felt like flying.
I set Maisie down in her car seat. Her head lolled as I got her settled, blonde ringlets hiding half her face. Her stuffed horse — the one with the matted mane she refused to let me wash — was clutched in her fist the way she held everything she loved. Too tight. Like she already knew the world took things.
She'd been an angel in the courthouse daycare. Drew a picture of a horse with a purple mane because Maisie believed horses should be more colorful, and nobody in her world had told her she was wrong yet. She saved her tears for bedtime, for the dark, for the whispered conversations she thought I couldn't hear about why Daddy didn't come to her school play. She'd learned to keep her face still from watching me do it, and that knowledge sank through me and settled somewhere I couldn't reach.
I brushed a curl off her forehead, barely touching, the way you handle something you'd kill for. She didn't stir.
This child was the reason I stayed as long as I did, and the reason I finally left.
I closed her door softly. Got in the driver's seat. Adjusted the mirror so I could see her face.
Then I pulled out of the parking garage and into the Dallas sun and let the road take us.
The highway stretched west, and I let it unspool while Dallas grew further away in the rearview mirror. I didn't look back. Not really. I watched it go with relief, with bone-deep exhaustion, with the strange aching grief of losing something that was already ash before you struck the match.
And with every mile, something loosened. Something in the tight spool of wire that had lived at the base of my skull since the day I said I do. The further from Dallas, the easier I breathed. Like the city had been pressing on my chest, and I'd called it normal.
Maisie slept. I drove. The radio stayed off because my thoughts were loud enough.
Somewhere past Weatherford, where the highway dipped, and the land opened up into rolling green hills that didn't care about my problems, the thought arrived.
I was supposed to be in law school by now.
