31. Jenna
JENNA
The certified mail slip shows up in our box on an ordinary morning, tucked behind a seed catalog and a flyer for the hardware store's winter sale, and I almost miss it entirely, half a second from tossing the whole stack on the counter unread.
I don't miss it. My name's printed across the top in block letters, SIGNATURE REQUIRED stamped in red beneath it, and my stomach knots the way it always does now at anything official-looking, a reflex I never fully unlearned no matter how many years I've had to try.
The post office in town closes at five, and I make it there with eleven minutes to spare, the twins buckled in the back arguing about whether a narwhal could beat a shark in a fight neither of them has any actual stake in.
I sign for the envelope with a hand that's steadier than I expect, given how loudly the rest of me is not steady at all, and I don't open it in the parking lot with two kids in the car listing off narwhal statistics they clearly invented on the spot.
I wait until they're both asleep.
The envelope sits on the kitchen table through dinner, through baths, through the whole bedtime routine, doing nothing and somehow taking up the whole room anyway.
I make tea I don't drink. I straighten a stack of mail that was already straight, twice.
Eventually I run out of things to pretend to be busy with, and I sit down across from it like it might say something first if I just wait long enough.
It doesn't. I have to be the one to open it.
The letterhead belongs to a law office I recognize immediately, the same firm with too many syllables in its name that showed up in my inbox back in the fall, the one I never answered, the one I let sit unread until the subject line stopped feeling like an emergency and started feeling like something I could keep outrunning if I just didn't look directly at it.
I was wrong about that, apparently. It caught up to me on paper this time.
RE: Walsh, Support and Custody Review. Petition for Modification of Visitation.
I read the first paragraph three times before the actual words start landing instead of just sliding past me, legal language dressed up formal and bloodless, the kind that turns a person's whole life into clauses and subsections.
Derek's attorney is requesting a formal review of the current visitation arrangement, citing his client's completion of a court-approved anger management program, six months of documented compliance, and what the letter calls a demonstrated and sustained change in circumstances warranting expanded parenting time.
A changed man, that's the story underneath all of it.
Those aren't the exact words the letter uses, but it's what every sentence is built to say without saying it outright, dressed up in enough legal padding that a judge who's never met Derek might actually believe it.
Six months of good behavior turned into six months of proof, like a person's whole character can be measured out in a program's completion date.
I know what a program certificate looks like.
I know exactly how easy it is to sit in a room for six months, say the right things to the right people, and walk out with a piece of paper that proves nothing except that a person can perform calm when someone's watching and grading him for it.
Derek could ace that test in his sleep. He was never bad at being controlled, not once, not in front of anyone who mattered.
He was always controlled, that was the whole trick, quiet that somehow got louder than shouting ever did, right up until the night it wasn't quiet anymore.
My hands are shaking by the time I set the letter down flat on the table, and I press both palms against the wood like I can hold the whole kitchen still through sheer force of will.
A judge who's never sat across a table from Derek Walsh doesn't know what years of careful volume looks like from the inside.
He'll see a certificate and a clean record and a man in a decent suit talking about growth, not the plate that hit the wall four inches from my head, not two four-year-olds frozen on the stairs listening to their father's voice climb somewhere I never let it climb in front of them again.
He sees paperwork. I see the actual man, and the actual man doesn't get erased by six months of anyone deciding to believe him.
I don't sleep much that night. I lie awake running worst versions of hearings I haven't even been scheduled for yet, a courtroom I've never stood in, a judge's face I can't picture handing down a decision I already know I won't be able to live with.
The twins pick up on the tension the next afternoon, the way they always do, some radar for a mood I thought I was hiding better than I apparently was.
"You keep doing the thing where you stare at nothing," Josie says, elbows on the counter, watching me still not finish making sandwiches I started ten minutes ago. "Is it a grown-up problem or a we-did-something problem?"
"Nothing either of you did. This one's mine to carry."
"That's what you say about all the grown-up problems." Eli slides onto a stool, more serious than an eight-year-old has any business looking over a peanut butter sandwich. "Is it about Dad?"
The word lands wrong every single time, small and heavy at once, a word that used to just mean somebody who tucked them in and now means something I have to brace for every time it comes up.
"Why would you think that?"
"Because you get the same face when his name comes up on the phone." Josie says it simply, not unkind, just observant in the way she's always been, cataloguing things nobody meant for her to notice. "Is he coming to visit again?"
"I don't know yet, baby."
"He said last time maybe we could go stay with him for a whole week." Eli picks at the crust of his sandwich, not quite looking at me. "Is that still happening?"
Every version of the true answer feels like handing them something too heavy for their hands, so I give them the smallest honest piece I can find instead. "There's some paperwork going on right now, that's all. Nothing's decided yet. It just means the grown-ups are talking."
"Is that a bad kind of paperwork or a boring kind?"
"Mostly boring," I lie, and hate myself a little for how easily it comes out, smooth and practiced, the exact kind of controlled calm I used to watch Derek perform and swore I'd never need to learn myself.
"Okay." Josie accepts it the way eight-year-olds accept most things adults tell them, provisionally, filed away for later reconsideration if the evidence ever stops matching the story. "Can I have the sandwich now or are you still thinking?"
"Go ahead. It's all yours."
They drift back to the living room eventually, some argument already brewing about whose turn it is to pick the show, and I stand alone in the kitchen with my hands flat on the counter, breathing through a feeling I can't quite name, grief and fear and old useless anger all tangled together so tight I can't tell them apart.
Rafe calls a little after eight, his name lighting up the screen while I'm loading the dishwasher, and something in me eases just seeing it there even before I answer.
"Hey." His voice comes through thinner than usual, worn down at the edges, a layover somewhere loud behind him, boarding announcements and the low roar of a terminal crowd. "Sorry it's so late. Been a day."
"You sound wiped."
"I am. Long one." He doesn't elaborate, and I don't push, the same unspoken deal we've kept since he left, a door he asked me to trust him to open himself when he's ready. "How are my two favorite menaces?"
"Currently debating who called the good couch cushion first. High stakes stuff over here."
He lets out a short laugh, worn thin but real. "Tell them I said the good cushion belongs to whoever didn't start the argument."
"That'll solve nothing and you know it."
"Worth a shot." A pause opens up on his end, longer than usual, and I can hear him breathing through it, the particular exhaustion of a man who's spent the whole day carrying something he hasn't set down yet. "You okay? You sound like you've got something on your mind."
I open my mouth. I get as far as drawing the breath I'd need to actually say it, the envelope still sitting on my kitchen table three feet away, Derek's attorney's careful language still looping through my head on a track I can't shut off.
I could tell him right now. I could hand him half of what I'm carrying and let him help me carry the rest, the way he's let me help carry his own worst nights more than once.
Then I hear it again underneath his voice, the flatness he's not quite hiding, whatever this trip actually is wearing him down to a version of himself thinner than I've ever heard, and I decide, in the space of that one held breath, that tonight isn't the night to add more weight to a man who's already running low.
"I'm fine," I say instead. "Just tired. Twin logistics take it out of a person."
"Copy that." He doesn't sound entirely convinced, but he doesn't push either, the same patience he's given me since the very beginning, trusting me to open my own doors on my own schedule. "I'll be home soon. Couple more days."
"Fly safe."
"Always do." Another pause, softer this time. "I miss you. More than makes sense for three days."
"Three days is plenty of time to miss somebody." My throat goes tight around the words, half from him and half from everything I'm not saying alongside them. "Come home soon."
"Working on it."
We talk another few minutes about nothing that matters, things like the twins' narwhal debate and a diner special Gunny's been raving about, and then his flight starts boarding and he has to go, his voice already pulling toward the noise behind him, promising he'll call again once he lands.
I stay at the kitchen table a long while after we hang up, the phone face down beside the envelope like the two of them might have something to say to each other if I leave them close enough.
Derek's letter is still sitting there when I finally reach for it again, the paper gone slightly soft at the corners from how many times I've picked it up and set it back down tonight, reading the same paragraph over and over until the words stop meaning anything new.
I fold it back along its original creases, careful, like precision might undo some of what it says, and slide it into its envelope, and tuck it into the drawer where I keep things I'm not ready to look at every single day.
I'll tell Rafe. Not tonight, not over a phone line with him running on fumes in some airport three states away, but soon, once he's home and steady and not carrying whatever he's carrying right now on top of it.
That's the plan I make myself believe as I turn off the kitchen light and head down the hall to check on two kids who have no idea their world just shifted slightly under their feet.
It feels like the right call standing here tonight, small and reasonable, one more day before I have to say the hard thing out loud. I don't know yet what one more day is going to cost either of us. I just know I'm not ready to find out tonight.