I had never allowed myself to consider how much I resented this pressure. How was any of it my doing? The notion that good parents could raise bad kids was increasingly out of favor. Nothing comes from nothing. So what had we permitted or forbidden that thousands of others had not permitted or forbidden without consequence?

Perhaps the worst truth was the one I failed to admit even to Julie, and barely to myself. Certainly, I was wildly grateful not to be Jill. Four years was a long time to have a pain in your tooth, but not in your heart. For almost four years, she had been without her girl. Jill’s pain was just beginning. Jill had only Belinda’s past. But I had Stefan’s past as well as his present and future. Within him, cached inside him like the rings of a tree, was still the chuckling baby with enormous feet or the six-year-old who liked his eggs sunny-side up and called me his “sunny-up egg.” I might have to contend with everything I hated about the situation, which was wound around everything I loved, but the fact remained, I could still hug Stefan, my only, my child.

And yet, to do that, I had to accept not just the child I had loved, but the man, with blood on his hands. I hadn’t accepted the fullness of his crime. I stopped just short of it. I sat up and quietly made my way to the window, looking out on a stereotypical postcard of forest majesty. I had to truly see that man and forgive him, just as the people in The Healing Project strove to do. It was time to express my remorse, and to seek renewal. I loved Stefan, but if I was honest, I had not forgiven him. Now, for his sake and mine, I would. And that would be the final step to ending the long night that had begun over three years ago, so that the rest of our lives could truly and cleanly begin, I thought. We could look toward a time when this awful time was a memory, fading slowly away.

It was too early to get up.

I slipped into the bathroom, brushed my teeth and, as the red fingers of dawn worked their way around the edges of the blinds, I got back into bed and curled up in the warm hollow next to Julie’s back.