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She continued. “I’m sure you’ve seen so much of this in your line of work. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“Because I asked.”
Right. He had a way of cutting things down to their most basic levels.
“It got to where I wasn’t getting up to take Lexi to school. I slept right through entire days, waking like a zombie to force myself to check on her. She was better back then, started to cook, and even tried to get me to eat. I wasn’t there for my own daughter because I was too wrapped up in my own pain.
“Anyway, Paula convinced me that the thing to do was to move back and be near them. If my own mother was still alive, I’d have come back to be with her, but as it is, the only grandparents left are Matt’s parents. It seemed like a good ideaat the time. I lived with them for the first few months in their mansion of a house where I felt like a warden. Paula is OK most of the time, but Richard, well, you’ve seen him. He’s a bully. His way or the highway.”
“I got that.”
Yes, he’d seen a great example of that tonight. “It got even easier to sleep my grief away when Paula took care of everything. Taking Lexi to school, cooking for her, taking her to doctor’s appointments. She said she just wanted to help, but I needed the kind of help they weren’t giving me. And then Richard changed everything.”
“How?”
If only she’d seen it coming. “He filed for custody of Lexi.”
“Hewhat?” Jack’s eyebrows rose.
“You heard me right. Later they tried to tell me that they wanted to do it so that they could make legal decisions for Lexi, like sign her up for school, without bothering me. They wanted to let me grieve. Get better in my own time. What they did had the opposite effect they wanted: it woke me up. I had a daughter to raise, and I could no longer afford to feel sorry for myself.”
“I don’t see you as someone who feels sorry for herself.”
“I did for a while. The thing is, when someone so close to you is so suddenly just gone, you’re left to think about every time you let them down, every harsh word spoken without thinking, everything left undone.”
The light shifted in Jack’s eyes, and he stared at her in silence. Somehow, he understood.
“Finally I made some phone calls and collected the small life insurance policy Matt left for us. A few days later, I bought my used car, and then I rented this house and moved us in. It isn’t much, but it’s home. And as it turned out, we didn’t have to go to court because Richard came to his senses. He must have realized with everything I’d done he no longer stood a chance. But thetruth is, I had sunk into a pit, and if it wasn’t for my faith I’m not sure I could have climbed back out again.”
“I get it now. It’s hard to forgive what they did to you.” Jack nodded.
“I had to forgive them, but it’s still hard to trust them.”
Sure, she wasn’t proud of it, but God knew so no use trying to hide it from Him.
“You don’t have to forgive anyone,” Jack stated firmly, with more sternness than she would have expected. “Some things are unforgivable.”
Maggie met his eyes because there was something he needed to understand. “Everything can be forgiven. No one deserves it, but that has nothing to do with it. If Christ forgave me, I think I can forgive them.”
“You sound like the pastor last Sunday.”
“That was a great sermon. I wish I’d understood it when I was younger. Maybe I wouldn’t have stayed away from the church for so long after I had Lexi.”
“So what will you do? You know they’ll be back tomorrow.”
“I’ll let Lexi decide.”
Jack blinked. “Is that a good idea?”
“You haven’t seen Richard around Lexi. He adores her, and she feels the same way about both of her grandparents. I don’t want Lexi to feel torn between us anymore. Maybe that’s why she’s been so difficult lately. Lexi lost her father. I don’t want her to lose the last link she has to him. Even if it makes things harder for me.”
“You’re amazing.” He spoke the words slowly, and his eyes seemed to say the words even more than his lips did.
The compliment shook her, coming as it did from a man who didn’t look like he handed them over with ease. “Oh please.”
“I mean it.”
I’m not the amazing one, my God is.The emotion behind those words made them catch in her throat.
