What Grace Could Say

Grace's therapist, Dr. Alvarez, asked to meet with me alone about six weeks into treatment, which was unusual enough that I spent the whole drive over bracing for the worst version of whatever she was about to tell me.

It wasn't the worst version. It also wasn't nothing.

"Grace has started to describe specific memories tied to the sound of the belt, and to being locked in a room," Dr. Alvarez said carefully. "She consistently describes one adult as the person who did the locking. She describes a second adult — taller, she says, with a different voice — as someone who was 'there too' on at least some of those occasions, but she hasn't been able to describe what that second person did, or didn't do, while he was there. That inconsistency isn't unusual in trauma memory at her age. It's also not something I can respectably interpret for you one way or the other."

"So she doesn't know if Nathan hurt her."

"She knows he was present for something that hurt her. Whether his presence was passive or active isn't something she's been able to articulate yet, and pushing her to clarify it before she's ready could do real damage to her recovery, regardless of what the answer turns out to be."

I sat with that for a long time after I left the office. Detective Ferris had told me almost the identical thing in different words — that the truth might arrive slowly, incompletely, or not at all, and that I'd have to make decisions about my own life without the clean resolution I kept waiting for.

That night, I told Nathan, through my lawyer, that I intended to file for divorce regardless of how the criminal case resolved. Not necessarily because I believed the worst of him. Because I'd realized, sitting in Dr. Alvarez's office, that Grace's safety couldn't be allowed to depend on my ability to eventually feel certain about a man I no longer fully recognized.