There are doors that don’t close, they just go through.
And I had already gone through a very brutal one.
I don’t hate him with the simple fire with which I hated Miriam at first.
I hate him in a different way.
With the icy clarity one has towards someone who sees the monster coming for years and keeps telling you to be patient because the table is already set.
That kills too.
Not in the same way, but it kills.
In the trial, the most devastating moment was not Miriam’s partial confession nor the technical description of the sedative.
It was then that Emma, from the protected room, repeated in a very low voice the phrase she had heard in the kitchen:
“When Trevor sees everything clearly, he’ll thank me.”
The whole room understood then that my children did not die in a fit of rage.
They died within a certain logic.
They died in the mind of a woman who believed she was correcting her son’s life.
Sometimes I still wake up thinking about coffins.
In Miriam’s hand in my hair.
In the blow of my forehead against the wood.
In Trevor’s voice telling me to leave.
