Chapter 277
Chapter 269. What Comes After.
SEDONA
The judge granted emergency temporary custody on a Tuesday morning, over the phone, in a hearing that lasted eleven minutes.
Adaeze had warned me it would be fast, given the circumstances, given a public park full of witnesses and a six-year-old’s stitches and a father already in custody facing charges that made the custody question almost an afterthought, there wasn’t much left to deliberate.
I didn’t feel the way I expected to feel, hearing it.
I had imagined this moment for seven months, the victory of winning Nick, the relief of finally having the legal ground beneath me solid enough to hold Nick’s whole weight. What I actually felt, standing in the Lincoln Park kitchen with the phone against my ear, was something quieter than triumph.
It was simply: he’s coming home. Two days after the picnic Nick was discharged from the hospital. His stitches were healing well. His concussion symptoms were already fading away. The doctor had insisted on a careful follow-up. He was tired. Quieter than usual. He flinched slightly at sudden noises in a way that hadn’t been there before, and that I understood, without anyone needing to explain it, would take time to fully settle.
He came home to the Lincoln Park house. Not a visit. Not two hours through a supervised window. Home, with his own room, his own things slowly arriving from his childhood home in boxes Mrs. Peterson helped pack.
I made up the guest room myself. I could have asked my mother, she would have done it gladly, would have turned it into one of her industrious projects within the hour. But I needed to do this part myself, slowly, with my own hands, the specific physical labour of preparing a space for a son I was only now, in real time, getting to actually know.
I didn’t know what he liked anymore. This was the thing that kept catching me off guard, small and constant, I knew what three-year-old Nick had liked, the specific textures and colours and small obsessions of a toddler I’d raised before everything fell apart.
I didn’t fully know what six-year-old Nick liked after we started growing apart and Catherine had entered the picture, taking his attention from me and I was let to rot in the background. I had been separated from him for close to a year now and I was relearning him in real time. Like relearning a language you once spoke fluently, then went years without using.
I called Mrs. Peterson. She had become, across these months, something closer to an ally than a family
nanny.
“What does he actually like now,” I said. “Not what he liked the last time I was still living there. Now p>
She walked me through it, and told me things, mostly about the shade of blue he preferred for his bedding, not the bright primary blue from his toddler years but a deeper colour, she told me about the books he’d outgrown and the ones he’d moved on to, mostly about birds and space, Drew’s influence visible in at least half of them. The way he liked his room organized now, not the chaos he dwelled in, leaving everything
13
What Come
messy
Clam
I wrote it all down. I went to three different stores in one afternoon, building a room from a list of facts about a child I was only now getting to know completely, the strange tender labour of it settling into something I didn’t have words for yet.
He noticed everything when he saw the finished room. “You got the blue right one p>
“Mrs. Peterson helped me get it right,” I said.
He walked the room slowly, touching things, the bookshelf, the small desk by the window, the star nightlight I’d ordered weeks ago, a near-perfect match to the one he had in Chicago, plugged into a socket low on the wall.
He stopped at the nightlight p>
“Is that…” He looked at me.
“Gerald the Boot needs a ceiling,” I said. “I thought maybe we could start fresh here. Different stars. Different constellations.” I paused. “Or we could bring Gerald with us, if that matters more to you. I just wanted you to have a choice p>
He was quiet for a long moment, looking at the small device, the careful pattern of stars it would project once it was switched on.
“New ones,” he said finally. “But Gerald comes too. He’s not retiring. He’s just getting a roommate p>
“Okay, Gerald gets a roommate p>
That first night, I sat on the edge of his new bed while he settled in. The unfamiliar weight of an actual bedtime routine. Not a phone call. Not a supervised window. Just an actual ordinary night where I would simply be down the hall if he needed me.
“Does this feel weird?” he asked. Quiet. Honest, the way he was always honest when it mattered most.
“A little,” I admitted. “Good weird. The kind where you’re not sure yet how to believe something this good is real, even though it is p>
He nodded, considering this the way he considered everything, seriously, completely.
“My head still hurts a little p>
“I know, bug. That is normal according to the doctor p>
“Will you stay until I fall asleep? Just tonight. I know I’m not a baby now p>
“You can ask me that every night for as long as you want. “Little or not p>
He settled back against the pillow, and I switched on the new nightlight, watching the stars scatter across the ceiling, different ones than Chicago, a whole new sky for him to slowly learn and name, the same careful work he’d done with Gerald all those months ago, except now I would be here to watch it happen instead of hearing about it second-hand through a phone line.
His eyes drifted closed slowly, already exhausted from the day’s work.
2/3
What Comester
Isat there long after his breathing evened out into sleep, watching the new stars settle into their
unfamiliar patterns above him, and let myself, finally, completely, feel the simple overwhelming reality of it.
He was home.
Not because of a courtroom victory, not because Adaeze’s careful argument had finally landed the way I’d hoped it would across so many difficult months.
Because of circumstance. Because of an afternoon none of us had wanted, a sound I would carry for the rest of my life, a fear so total it had nearly stopped my own heart in a public park.
But he was home now.
I would take it however it had finally, irreversibly arrived.
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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.