The night before the trial, I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that hallway, the scuffed linoleum, the crooked 5 on the door, the envelope fat with cash in my hand. I heard Elijah’s soft, rehearsed thank-yous, Viola’s sniffles, the way they never quite let me step inside. On Dante’s laptop, we watched years of footage in a single cruel sitting: Marcus arriving like a ghost clocked in for a shift, letting himself into 504, staying just long enough to turn my love into rent and cable and weekend trips I’d never been invited on. Each time he left, he took my belief with him, sliced thinner and thinner until there was almost nothing left to cut.

When the prosecutor played the warehouse recording, Marcus’s laughter filled the courtroom, ugly and familiar. “She thinks she’s doing something noble,” he said, his voice echoing off the wood. “Let her. Money’s money.” There it was—the moment my marriage died, preserved in digital amber. Elijah and Viola didn’t look at me as the numbers rolled out: the total I had paid, the transfers, the messages. Their lawyer tried to paint them as desperate, grieving parents, but the timestamps told another story: withdrawals lined up neatly with my deposits; Marcus’s arrivals lined up neatly with their new purchases. My grief had been itemized. My sacrifice had a shopping list. I sat very still, hands folded, while their world tilted under the weight of proof. I thought of Malik at home with Miss Hattie, playing cards, his laughter spilling down the hallway like something fragile finally learning it was allowed to be loud. For the first time since the accident, I let myself imagine a future that didn’t include apologizing to the dead or paying rent on a lie. The fear didn’t vanish, but it loosened, like a knot remembering it could be undone. My life, I realized, had room for more than mourning and maintenance. It had room for choi… Continues…