22. Ryan #5
His attorney does not ask another question. “No further questions.”
Arthur stands for redirect. He doesn’t drag her back through any of it. He just cleans it up in four quiet strokes. “Alison. Did Ryan Harrington tell you what to say here today?”
“No.”
“Did Walter Harrington?”
“No.”
“Did I?”
“No.”
“Did anyone, anywhere, ask you to lie about your father?”
“No.”
Arthur nods. “Nothing further, Your Honor.”
The judge looks at Ally, and something in his face has gone gentle. “You may step down, Ms. O’Toole.”
Her legs shake when she stands. I’m moving before I’ve decided to.
Dad catches the back of my jacket. “Not yet.”
Fuck. Ally doesn’t come to me — she can’t, not here — she goes to Arthur’s table, and he pulls out the chair beside him, and she sits, and I can see from thirty feet away exactly how hard she’s working to hold herself in one piece now that the box has let her go.
The judge starts talking, and I catch maybe half of it.
Evidence. Statements. Conditions. Roman’s custody status.
The criminal proceedings. The emergency guardianship questions around Tobias.
Arthur answers when he’s addressed. Roman’s attorneys answer when they’re addressed, in smaller and smaller voices.
The judge makes two things clear, and they’re the only two things I need.
Roman is not going anywhere. And Tobias is not going back into Roman O’Toole’s custody while the criminal case and the guardianship proceedings move forward.
That’s it. That’s the part my whole body has been clenched around all morning.
Tobias stays. Tobias is safe. Tobias sleeps in the room my parents built for him before they even knew he’d get to use it.
The gavel comes down. “Court is adjourned.”
I don’t wait. Dad doesn’t try to stop me this time. I’m around the end of the bench before
Ally is fully out of her chair, and she turns, and I get one arm around her before I remember — careful. I loosen instantly. “Sorry.”
“I’m okay.” Her voice is a ruin.
I kiss her forehead. “You did so good. So fucking good.”
She shakes her head against me. “Don’t.”
“Okay.”
I don’t tell her she’s strong. I don’t tell her Jane would be proud. I don’t tell her it’s over, because it isn’t, and she’d know I was lying, and I promised her a long time ago I wouldn’t. I just keep my hand flat against her back while Arthur talks low with Dad and Mom gathers her things.
Ally holds it together through all of it.
Through the courthouse hallway. Through the elevator.
Through the lobby, chin up, past the cameras outside that I’d like to set on fire.
Through Dad holding the back door of the car open for us.
She gets in. I slide in beside her. Mom takes the front seat, Dad gets behind the wheel, the doors close—
And Ally breaks.
Not cries. Breaks. The first sound out of her doesn’t even sound human, and it goes straight through me and lodges somewhere I’ll never get it back out of. I pull her into me before Dad even has the car in gear.
“I’ve got you.”
She folds into my chest, both hands fisting in my shirt, holding on like the car is going over a cliff. “I had to say it.”
“I know.”
“I had to say Mommy. Out loud. In front of him. I had to say it.” My eyes burn instantly. “She didn’t answer me.” Her whole body is shaking. “Three weeks ago I said it and she didn’t answer me, and today I had to say it again, and she still—“
“I want her back.”
There is nothing I can say to that. There is no fact I can find, no plan I can build, no piece of evidence, no phone call, no version of the truth that answers it. So I don’t try to.
“I want my mom. I want her back.”
“I know.” I close my eyes and press my face into her hair. “I know.”
Mom is crying silently in the front seat. Dad doesn’t pull away from the curb. He just sits there with both hands on the wheel and gives us the time, the way Arthur waited this morning, the way all of them have learned to do — no clock, no rush, no you have to be somewhere. Just time.
Ally sobs into my chest until my shirt is soaked through, and I hold her, and that is the entire thing I have to offer.
No evidence. No plan. No Arthur. No case.
For three weeks I have been trying to fix this. I’ve wanted to find the right person, the right law, the right piece of paper, the right anything that would make what happened even slightly less permanent.
There isn’t one.
I know how to find things. I couldn’t find this. Her mother is dead. Tobias wakes up in our bed because his own isn’t safe enough yet for his own head to believe in. Ally cries in the back of a car for a woman who can’t answer her.
And I can’t fix any of it.
So I hold her. Because I love her. Because I love her so fucking much it hurts to sit still inside it. Because somewhere in the last three weeks I finally understood the thing I spent my whole life too busy solving problems to learn — that sometimes loving somebody isn’t finding the answer.
Sometimes it’s sitting in the back seat while they fall apart, and making damn sure they never once have to do it alone.