I told her it wasn’t to her; it was for them. For Rick, who’d stared at his fries and whispered that Brent said if he told, I’d lose them. For Noah, whose booster seat had split like a cheap toy and whose one-armed dinosaur I’d fished from under German leather that still smelled like someone else’s cologne. I’d read the crash data until the numbers blurred, then watched Detective Ramirez’s face go still when the timestamps lined up with the bar’s security footage. Denise, the lawyer everyone said I couldn’t afford, slid a paragraph between Brent’s swagger and Laura’s fear that turned “accident” into “negligence” and “weekends” into “endangerment.” By dawn there was a warrant, a social worker on their porch, and an old man on Lakeshore Drive finally told the blood on his asphalt had been a child’s. In court, Laura’s “Yes” to the question about Brent drinking cracked something invisible; the judge’s pen moved, and custody flipped like a breaker. The lake house shrank to a line item; my one-room over the pizza place stretched into a crooked two-bedroom on Elm, bunk beds scraping the ceiling, a dinosaur guarding the windowsill, while on Linden Avenue, strangers started saying my name like it meant someth… Continues…