Chapter 8
Healing began badly.
I expected relief after court.
Instead, Wren started hiding food.
Crackers in shoes.
Toast crusts under pillows.
Grapes in toy bins.
One night, I found a dinner roll tucked inside Elise’s old music box.
I sat on the floor and cried silently.
Desmond found me.
“She does it less if you don’t make a big face.”
I looked up.
He was standing in the doorway, serious and tired.
Ten years old and teaching me how not to scare a hungry child.
“Thank you,” I said.
He shrugged.
“I learned.”
That hurt.
Mara helped me create snack baskets.
One in the kitchen.
One in Wren’s room.
One in Desmond’s room, because he had been saving food too.
He denied it.
Then cried when I said the basket was his whether he needed it or not.
Dr. Anand referred both children to a trauma therapist, Dr. Keene.
Wren spoke mostly through drawings.
She drew a pantry with teeth.
She drew me driving away.
She drew Desmond standing in front of a door.
She drew Corinne very tall.
Then, one day, she drew herself at a table with a bowl full of soup.
I kept that drawing on the fridge.
Desmond’s therapy was quieter.
He wanted facts.
Rules.
What happens if Corinne gets out?
What happens if Lydia lies?
What happens if Victor, his biological father, comes back?
That last one surprised me.
“Do you want Victor back?” I asked.
Desmond looked horrified.
“No. But Mom said you’d send me to him.”
I called Samuel that night.
We began the process for legal guardianship.
Desmond had no stable legal father.
Victor had abandoned him.
Corinne had abused him.
I had loved him without paperwork for years.
Now the paperwork needed to catch up.
When I told Desmond, he stared at me.
“You want to adopt me?”
“If you want that.”
His mouth opened.
Closed.
“What about Wren?”
“She wants it too.”
He looked toward the living room, where Wren was eating apple slices from her snack basket.
“She said that?”
“She asked if it would make you stay.”
His face crumpled.
“Can I think?”
“Of course.”
He thought for four seconds.
“Yes.”
Then he ran into my arms so hard I almost fell backward.
From the living room, Wren shouted, “Does this mean Desmond is ours?”
He laughed through tears.
“I was already yours.”
May you like
Wren nodded.
“I know. But now paper knows.”
