Chapter 9
The next six months were the happiest of our lives.
Slow, quiet, perfect.
Jamie started therapy twice a week.
The nightmares became less frequent.
Once a week, then once a month, then not at all.
He joined the local soccer team.
Scored his first goal in the last game of the season.
We screamed so loud our throats were sore the next day.
Lila started art classes.
Her drawings were hung in the town library’s children’s exhibit.
She invited everyone we knew.
My parents were the first ones there, taking a hundred photos, telling every stranger that was their granddaughter.
Mark and I started date nights again.
Every Friday.
Dinner, a movie, sometimes just a drive around town, talking.
We’d forgotten how to be just us.
How to laugh about stupid things, argue about where to eat, hold hands in the car.
It was like falling in love all over again.
My parents were at every game, every recital, every birthday.
They’d sold their old house and moved ten minutes away.
Said they wanted to be close enough to babysit whenever we needed.
We never asked them to choose between us and Mara.
They chose on their own.
They never visited her in prison.
Never took her calls.
When she sent letters, they sent them back unopened.
“Our family is you, Mark, and the kids,” my dad said one night over dinner.
“That’s all that matters now.”
Mara appealed her sentence twice.
Both times, the court upheld it.
She’d be in her sixties when she got out.
If she got out.
I didn’t think about her much anymore.
She was a chapter in my life that was over.
Closed.
Done.
I was too busy living the new one.
The good one.
Dr. Hale said we were “a model of healing.”
Said most families didn’t bounce back this well.
I told her it wasn’t bouncing back.
It was bouncing forward.
We’d never be the same people we were before Jamie was taken.
But that wasn’t a bad thing.
We were stronger now.
Closer.
We didn’t take the small things for granted.
A quiet night at home.
A cartwheel across the living room.
A “good morning” from a kid who was safe in his bed.
We held onto those things.
Cherished them.
Because we knew how quickly they could be taken away.
Jamie’s tenth birthday was coming up.
We planned a big party.
All his friends from soccer, Lila’s friends from art class, the whole family.
A bounce house, a piñata, a cake shaped like a soccer ball.
The day before the party, Jamie came to me.
He was holding something behind his back.
“I made you something,” he said.
Shy.
I knelt down.
He handed me a drawing.
It was our family.
Standing in front of the new house.
The treehouse in the background.
Four stick figures, holding hands.
But this time, there was something extra.
A big sun in the sky, with a smiley face.
And words at the bottom, written in his messy ten-year-old handwriting:
My Family. My Home. My Safe Place.
I cried.
Happy tears.
The best kind.
I hugged him so tight he laughed.
“I love it,” I said.
“I’m going to frame it. Hang it right above the fireplace. So everyone who comes in sees it.”
He beamed.
May you like
“Good,” he said.
“Because it’s true.”
