Chapter 248
Chapter 244. Unfit
SEDONA
I read the motion at the kitchen table, alone, because Cameron had offered to summarize it for me and I had told him no. I needed the actual words. I needed to know exactly what they’d written, not the version filtered through someone protecting me from it.
“Delayed and inadequate medical attention. A pattern consistent with maternal neglect. Increasingly unstable behaviour p>
I read it twice. The second time slower, the way you read something, you’re trying to feel the full weight of it rather than simply process.
It didn’t land where the stalking complaint had landed. It didn’t land where the garden had landed, Logan’s hand closing around my arm, the specific violence of that moment. Those had been attacks on my safety, and I had learned, slowly and at real cost, how to receive attacks on my safety without letting them
dismantle me.
This was different.
This was an attack on the one thing I had given everything to. The one place where I had poured every available hour of three exhausting, isolating years, Nick’s fevers tracked in a notebook nobody asked to see, appointments scheduled around Logan’s calendar instead of mine, nights spent reading about ear infections and allergy protocols and developmental milestones while Logan slept undisturbed two rooms away. I had been invisible in every other part of that marriage. But I had not been invisible there. I had been entirely present there, the one place where my full attention had never wavered.
And now it was being read back to me as harm. I didn’t spiral that night. I want to be precise about that. Looking back, it would have been easy to call it spiralling, and it wasn’t. It was something quieter and harder to name. Raw, not unravelling. The specific ache of having the real thing you ever did is called the opposite of what it was.
I went up to my room and pulled the box from the closet, the one I’d brought from Seattle without fully knowing why, the one with three years of Nick’s medical history organized the way I’d always organized it, obsessively, completely, because it was the one place where being obsessive had felt like love instead of a symptom.
I spread it on the bed. Every appointment card. Every pharmacy receipt. The paediatrician’s notes from the fever, the actual ones, the timeline that showed I had called twice before getting him in, that the practice had been fully booked, that I had taken him to urgent care the moment the fever crossed the threshold I’d been told to watch for.
I sat with all of it spread across the comforter and felt the specific loneliness of having been the only witness to my own devotion for three years.
Dante met me in the room around 12 O’clock midnight. He stared at me softly. He never said a word, but he faked a smile. And he never offered me the kind of reassurance that would have required me to act being fine. He just sat down on the other side of the bed. He carefully raised his ribs and looked at the papers spread between us.
12
< Unfit 1
“What’s this one?” he said, pointing at a card,
Claim
“Ear infection. He was two.” I picked it up. “I caught it before it got bad because I knew the signs; he’d pull at his ear and get quiet, which wasn’t normal for him. Most kids cry. He went quiet.” I turned the card over in my hands. “Logan was in Singapore. I drove him to urgent care myself at eleven at night p>
“Tell me the next one p>
I told him the next one.
We went through them like that, one by one, slow and deliberately. I was narrating what each entry actually meant, the real version, the context nobody had bothered to include in three sworn affidavits. The vaccination schedule I’d tracked meticulously because Nick’s pediatrician had warned about a sensitivity. The allergy testing I’d pushed for after noticing a pattern nobody else had noticed. The fever that had become, in Logan’s lawyer’s hands, a single damning sentence with everything that explained it surgically removed.
Dante didn’t fill the silences with comfort that would have rung hollow. He just listened, fully, the way he listened to everything, and occasionally said the thing that needed saying.
3
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Florence
A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.