Chapter 5: Reaching
Eric will spend a long time answering for what he did.
Kidnapping. Fraud. A forged death. The slow theft of two children’s futures.
There is no charm that talks its way out of a daughter who walks into a courtroom alive.
But I find I don’t spend much time thinking about his sentence.
I spend it watching my two children learn each other again.
It should have been strange, a thirteen-year-old reunion between a boy who couldn’t speak and a girl who’d been taught to be invisible.
It wasn’t.
The first afternoon Janice came home, she walked into the room where Jeremy was sitting, and neither of them said a word.
She just crossed the floor and sat down beside him, close, the way they’d slept as babies.
And Jeremy — my silent boy, my boy who had held the truth alone for eight years — reached over and took her hand.
