Part Five: What's Mine
The trial took eleven months. I testified twice — once about the driveway, once about the smoke, and both times I looked at my father across the courtroom and felt nothing crack in my chest that hadn't already cracked on Riverside Drive. He didn't look back at me either time. I don't think he'd looked at me, really looked, since before my mother died. It turns out you can stop being someone's daughter long before anyone says the words out loud.
He was convicted on both counts. Raymond too. The sentences were long enough that neither of them will be free before I'm well into my thirties, which is its own kind of strange arithmetic — my whole adult life measured out, unasked for, against the length of their punishment.
Olivia and I didn't speak for almost a year. When we finally did, it was in a coffee shop two blocks from Aunt Meredith's house, the same kind of coffee she'd wanted to stop for on the night everything broke apart. She cried before I did. She apologized in the specific, exhausting way people apologize when they've spent months rehearsing it, and I let her get all the way through it before I told her the only thing I actually needed her to hear.
"I don't think you meant for it to happen. But I need you to understand something, Liv — you grew up believing I mattered less than you did, and you never once questioned why. That's not your fault. But it's not nothing, either."
She didn't argue with me. That, more than the apology, was what made me believe she was starting to understand.
I used what remained of my mother's trust — released early, finally, by a court that had no more reason to leave it in anyone's hands but mine — to finish the transfer to Boston University I'd once packed away in a backpack and a secret. I moved into an apartment with a lock I control and a lease with only my name on it. Some nights I still wake up smelling gasoline that isn't there, hearing red and blue where there's only streetlight through the blinds.
But I stopped being anyone's unwanted daughter the night my father decided I was disposable, and I stopped being anyone's witness the day I testified and walked out of that courtroom without looking back.
What I am now is simpler than either of those things, and it took me nearly two years to be able to say it without flinching.
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I am the one who survived it. And for the first time in my life, that's enough to be.
THE END
