She brings bags of organic groceries when Audrey is suffering from sleep deprivation. She sits cross-legged on the plush nursery rug and patiently allows Liam to yank her hair with his chubby, uncoordinated fists. Crucially, she no longer begs for our forgiveness every time she walks through the front door. This is a massive relief, because forgiveness that is obsessively demanded eventually mutates into just another emotional burden for the victim to carry. Instead, Sarah committed to the much harder, more agonizing work: she fundamentally altered her behavior.
One brilliant spring afternoon, nearly a full calendar year after the day I dropped the white roses on the marble floor, I walked into the nursery and halted in the doorway.
Audrey was sitting in the wooden rocking chair, gently swaying back and forth with Liam sound asleep against her collarbone. A beam of golden sunlight slanted through the plantation shutters, falling directly across her face and illuminating the soft, breathable cotton blanket draped over our son’s back. Her skin, which had once been scrubbed raw and bleeding under the tyrannical authority of a sociopath, looked incredibly warm, vibrant, and whole. If you knew exactly where to look under the harsh light, there was a faint, ghost-like discoloration on her forearm where the worst chemical irritation had burned her, but it was fading with time.
