The Divorce

Nathan didn't contest the divorce, and he didn't contest the permanent protective order that came with it, which our lawyer told me was either a sign of genuine remorse or a calculated decision to avoid a trial that might surface more of his phone records. I stopped trying to guess which it was. It cost too much, emotionally, to keep running that particular loop.

He asked, once, through his own lawyer, for supervised contact with Grace once she was older, "if she ever wanted it." I didn't respond to that request, and neither did Grace's therapist recommend I consider it any time soon. Some doors, Dr. Alvarez said, don't need to be permanently closed to be closed for now.

Curtis was formally charged three months later, based on the two decades-old complaints combined with a third, more recent statement from another former placement who came forward after seeing a small item about the case in a regional paper. Nathan was never charged. Ferris told me honestly that without more from Grace than her memory could currently support, there wasn't enough to prosecute him specifically — only enough to justify keeping him away from her, permanently, through the family court system instead of the criminal one.

"I know that's not the ending you wanted," Ferris said.

It wasn't. But it was, I was starting to understand, the only kind of ending some of these stories actually offer — not a verdict clean enough to explain everything to a seven-year-old someday, but a wall built high enough, and early enough, that she'd never have to find out the rest of it the hard way.

I moved us into a smaller house that fall, in a different school district, with a bedroom door that had never once been locked from the outside and never would be.