Her Name Was Kate

The trial took almost a year. Vivian was convicted on the charges tied to my mother's death and, separately, on charges tied to what happened in our house, and the judge made a point of naming both in the sentencing, like she wanted the record to be clear that neither one was smaller than the other.

My dad and I still live in the same house, though we repainted my room that spring, and this time nobody locks the door from the outside for any reason at all.

Every photo I ever had of my mother is back up on the walls, plus new ones Meg helped me find in boxes I'd never been allowed to open before — my mom at seventeen, my mom pregnant with me, my mom laughing at something just out of frame that none of us will ever know the punchline to.

Aunt Meg comes for dinner every Friday now, and nobody has ever once asked me to call her anything other than what she already is.

Some mornings my dad still slips and calls me "kiddo" in the exact voice Vivian used to use for "sweetheart," and I've started to notice it doesn't make my stomach drop the way it used to, because nobody in this house is waiting for me to say a sentence I don't mean.

I still say good morning to a photograph before I leave for school most days, the one of her holding me at the beach, restored now, framed, sitting right where anyone walking past can see it.

"Good morning, Mom," I tell her, and I've never once had to be asked twice.