Chapter 7
Riley
The morning of the first custody hearing dawned gray and cold, and I woke with dread sitting heavy in my stomach like a stone.
I’d been awake since four, staring at the ceiling while my mind rehearsed the same disasters on a loop.
The judge siding with Todd. The caseworker changing her mind.
Someone uncovering the marriage for what it was and waiting at the courthouse with proof, with questions, with the authority to erase us.
To take Mia and hand her back to a man who knew how to smile in public and rot everything he touched in private.
By the time the light crept through the curtains, fear had stopped branching. It had narrowed. One outcome, endless variations.
In the bathroom, my hands refused to cooperate.
Mascara streaked where it shouldn’t. I wiped it off and tried again, jaw tight.
My hands never shook. Not on calls. Not in fires.
Not when seconds mattered and people were screaming.
But this wasn’t chaos I could run toward.
This was Mia. This was the part of my life I couldn’t afford to lose.
The clothes waited on the back of the door, exactly where I’d left them. A blazer from a thrift store, bought for a version of my life that never happened. Slacks that passed for respectable. Small earrings. Nothing that drew attention. Nothing that invited questions.
Professional. Neutral.
It felt like armor.
I put them on and looked at myself in the mirror.
The woman staring back looked like a stranger.
Someone competent, put-together. Someone who had her life in order, who made responsible decisions, who definitely hadn't been lying awake since before dawn imagining every possible way this could fall apart.
I didn't recognize her. I was used to seeing myself in loose T-shirts and cargo pants, in turnout gear and station uniforms. Clothes that let me move, let me work, let me disappear into the background without anyone looking twice.
I'd never dressed to attract attention. There was no point.
Attention meant scrutiny, and scrutiny meant questions I didn't want to answer.
But today I needed to look like someone a judge would trust with a child. Today I needed to be the stranger in the mirror.
A knock on the bathroom door made me jump.
"Riley?" Liam's voice was muffled through the wood. "You okay in there?"
I took a breath. Steadied myself. "Fine. Almost ready."
I opened the door and found him standing in the hallway, already dressed. Slacks and a button-down shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows, looking as uncomfortable as I felt. He kept tugging at his collar like it was choking him.
"You don't have to come."
His eyes met mine. Steady. Certain. "Yeah. I do."
There was no room for argument in his voice. No hesitation. He was coming because he'd said he would, because this was part of the arrangement, because showing up as a united front was what the court needed to see.
But something in the way he looked at me made it feel like more than that.
I didn't have time to examine it. Whatever it was could wait. Mia couldn’t.
"Okay." I stepped past him, keys already in my hand. "Let's go.
Family court occupied a different building than where we'd gotten married, but the fluorescent dread felt the same.
The lights buzzed louder here, harsher. The air smelled sharper, like disinfectant and old paper, a place scrubbed too often and never clean in the ways that mattered.
Voices dropped the moment you stepped inside.
Shoes squeaked against the floor, every sound slightly too loud, like it might be noted, recorded.
This place felt less like administration and more like judgment.
Here, strangers didn’t just witness your life—they decided it. Measured it. Reduced it to files and timestamps. One misstep, one wrong tone, and everything could tilt. The stakes pressed closer, heavier, as if the walls themselves were leaning in.
Whatever dread I’d felt before, this was worse.
We made it through security, collected our things from the plastic bins, and started down the hallway toward Courtroom B. My heels clicked against the linoleum, too loud, announcing my presence to everyone we passed.
And then I saw him.
Todd stood near the water fountain, talking to a man in a suit who must have been his lawyer.
He looked respectable. That was the worst part.
He'd cleaned up well, shaved, put on clothes that made him look like a concerned stepfather instead of the monster I knew him to be.
His smile was practiced and charming, the same smile he'd used on my mother all those years ago, the one that hid everything rotten underneath.
Then his eyes found me across the hallway.
The smile didn't change. Not exactly. But something behind it shifted, turned cold and calculating, and my skin started to crawl.
He said something to his lawyer, then walked toward us. Slow. Deliberate. Like a predator who knew his prey couldn't run.
"Riley." His voice was warm, pleasant, pitched for the people around us to hear. "Looking domesticated today."
I couldn’t speak. My throat sealed shut, seventeen again, trapped in the kitchen doorway while he smiled at my mother and I memorized the colors of the bruises under her sleeves—yellow fading to green, green turning purple—counting them like that might keep them from spreading
His gaze slid to Liam, sizing him up the way he sized up everyone. Looking for weaknesses. Finding, apparently, nothing worth his time. "New husband. Convenient timing."
Liam's hand pressed against the small of my back. Warm. Unmoving. The kind of contact that didn’t ask permission or demand anything—just stayed.
"We should get to the courtroom," His voice was calm, but there was steel underneath it. A warning.
Todd's smile widened. "Of course. Wouldn't want to be late." He leaned closer, just enough that only I could hear. "See you in there, sweetheart."
The word landed like a slap. Sweetheart. The same thing he'd called me when I was a teenager, when the bruises were fresh and my mother was making excuses and I was counting the days until I turned eighteen—until I could get out, and never look back.
His lawyer pulled him away before anyone could respond, but his smirk lingered in the air like cigarette smoke. Like something that would take days to wash out of my clothes.
I realized I was shaking.
I also realized Liam hadn't moved his hand. Of course he had. He always noticed the small things, the shifts you never named. And he didn’t pull away, like he’d already decided this was something to hold steady until I could.
We found a bench down the hallway, far enough from Todd and his lawyer that they couldn't hear us. I sat down heavily, my legs unsteady beneath me. Liam lowered himself beside me, close but not crowding.
"That's him?" he asked quietly. "Todd?"
I nodded. Didn't trust my voice.
Liam was quiet for a moment, his jaw tight. When he spoke again, his voice was low, controlled. "The way you froze up back there. He's done more than fight for custody, hasn't he?"
I dropped my gaze to my hands, clasped tight in my lap. The ring flashed under the fluorescent lights—too bright, too new. Proof. Protection. Paper-thin armor I kept twisting like it might remind me why we were here.
The words stuck in my throat. I'd never said them out loud to anyone outside a police report. Never had to explain what Todd was, what he'd done, the years I'd spent learning to survive him.
Liam deserved to know. He was in this now. But saying it meant letting him see the parts of me I kept buried—the scared sixteen-year-old who'd counted bruises, who'd learned to make herself small, who'd failed to protect her mother and had spent every day since trying to make up for it.
What if he looked at me differently after? What if he saw damage instead of strength? What if—
I forced the thought down. Mia needed me to be strong. Mia needed me to do this.
"He hurt us." My throat tightened, the words catching, and I had to stop. Breathe. Try again. "Me and my mom. When I was a teenager."
My voice came out quieter than I meant it to, thinner, like speaking any louder might crack something I couldn't afford to break. I kept my eyes on the floor, tracing the pattern in the linoleum—anything to avoid seeing his face change.
"I got out when I turned eighteen." The words steadied, just barely. Practice. Repetition. Facts I could control. "Mia didn't have that option."
Liam didn't say anything. Didn't offer empty comfort or pointless platitudes. He just sat there, solid and present, his hand still warm against my back.
"I'm not going to let him take her." My voice didn’t rise. "I don't care what I have to do."
"I know." His voice was steady. Certain. "And you're not doing it alone."
I looked at him then. Really looked. Searching for the hook, the fine print, the place where the promise would turn.
Years of monsters had trained me for that. For smiles with teeth behind them. For kindness that always came with a cost.
I didn’t find it.
And that was the part I didn’t know how to handle—wanting to believe him, even while every old instinct told me not to.
"We should go in." I was already on my feet before I could pull the feeling apart. "It's almost time."
Judge Morrison presided from the bench like a queen surveying her kingdom.
She was in her sixties, sharp-eyed, with silver hair pulled back in a severe bun and reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.
She looked like someone who'd seen every trick in the book and wasn't impressed by any of them.
The kind of judge who could smell bullshit from across the room and had no patience for it.