The New House

Grace picked out her own room in the new house, a small one at the end of the hall with a window that caught the morning light, and she asked, the first night, if she could leave the door open "just a crack."

I told her she could leave it however she wanted, every night, for as long as she needed to.

It took her almost a year to leave it all the way open.

School helped more than I expected. Nobody there knew her story, and for the first time since we'd adopted her, Grace got to just be a second grader who liked dinosaurs and was mediocre at spelling and occasionally got in trouble for talking during silent reading — ordinary, unremarkable trouble, the kind I found myself grateful for in a way I never would have predicted before any of this happened.

Dr. Alvarez continued seeing her twice a month, then once a month, as the nightmares spaced further apart. She never fully stopped flinching at the sound of a belt buckle — some things, Dr. Alvarez told me gently, don't disappear so much as they get smaller and less frequent, manageable instead of erased — but she stopped associating every tall man's voice with danger, which felt, some weeks, like the biggest victory either of us had.

Curtis's trial was scheduled for the following spring. Grace wouldn't be required to testify — her early statements to Detective Ferris, recorded under strict forensic interview protocols, would be used instead, sparing her the courtroom entirely. I was grateful for that in a way I didn't have words for.

Nathan sent one letter that winter, through his lawyer, addressed to Grace but routed through mine for review first. I read it twice, decided nothing in it was safe for a seven-year-old still working through what parts of the story to hold onto, and didn't pass it along. I told our lawyer to inform his that there wouldn't be a response, and that further letters wouldn't be forwarded either.