Chapter 10: After
The drive home from the courthouse took twenty minutes.
Naomi stopped at the school on the way.
Maisie came out at the gate with her backpack bouncing and a drawing in her hand — a house, two figures, a yellow sun taking up half the sky.
"That's me and you," Maisie said, pointing at the two figures.
"And that's our house."
"I can see that." Naomi crouched down to look at it properly.
"Who's the sun?"
Maisie considered this seriously.
"Nobody.
It's just the sun."
"Fair enough."
They stopped at the bakery on the corner and Maisie chose a biscuit with pink icing and then immediately changed her mind and chose one with yellow icing instead.
Naomi let her take both.
At home, Maisie sat at the kitchen table and ate her biscuit and told Naomi about a boy in her class who had tried to put a crayon in his ear and had to go to the nurse.
Naomi listened and asked the right questions and made tea and felt, very quietly, like the walls of the house had settled back into place around them.
Later, after Maisie was in bed, Naomi sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold in front of her.
Ruth had texted: *Carol called me.
I'm so glad.
Are you okay?*
Eleanor Mercer had sent a card — an actual card, handwritten, posted from Edinburgh: *I hope she is home where she belongs.
She always was.*
Graham had called that afternoon.
She had answered.
"I'm sorry," he said.
He sounded like he meant it and like he knew it wasn't enough and like he was saying it anyway.
"I know," she said.
"I should have—"
"Graham.
I know."
A long pause.
"Can I still see her?" he asked.
"I know the schedule is being set, I just — can I still be her dad?"
"You were always going to be her dad.
That was never the question."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Thank you."
After the call, Naomi washed her cup and put it away.
She thought about Vanessa at the top of the stairs, gripping the banister.
*This isn't finished.*
But it was.
Not with noise or triumph — just with a door closing, and a child asleep upstairs, and the ordinary quiet of an evening that belonged to nobody but them.
She turned off the kitchen light.
She checked on Maisie once more — the small shape under the duvet, the drawing propped on the bedside table, the yellow sun taking up half the sky.
She pulled the door to, just slightly.
And went to bed.
---
*Some people spend years trying to take what they were never owed — and the saddest part is they never understand what they truly lost in the process.*
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