Chapter 2 #2
Eight months. Two-parent household. Todd—my stepfather—the man I learned early not to trust. His lawyers were already building their case.
The walls were closing in, and I was running without finding a way out.
My lunch break was thirty minutes. I spent twenty-seven of them in the station bathroom, sitting on a closed toilet lid, scrolling through legal documents on my phone.
Todd's latest filing glowed on the screen, each paragraph a carefully crafted knife.
The petitioner contends that the respondent, Riley Santos, lacks the stability and resources necessary to provide adequate care for the minor child...
I read it twice. Then a third time. Let the words sink into the place where I kept all the things that could destroy me if I thought about them too hard.
Todd Harris. My stepfather. The man my mother had married when I was sixteen, when she was desperate and in the grip of addiction and convinced that any man was better than no man.
He'd seemed charming at first. They always did.
Bringing flowers and fixing things around the apartment and calling me "sweetheart" in a voice that made my skin crawl even before I understood why.
The first time he hit my mother, I was sixteen and a half.
Six months after they started dating. She’d burned dinner.
He backhanded her across the kitchen. Afterward, he apologized for an hour while she cried and told him it was okay—that she understood, that she shouldn’t have been so careless, that she deserved it.
I remember standing in the doorway, frozen, watching my mother comfort the man who’d just split her lip. Watching her apologize to him, saying it was her fault. Something broke inside me that night. Something that never quite healed right.
The first time he hit me was six months later.
I was already seventeen. I don’t remember what I’d done wrong—because it doesn’t matter.
It never needs a reason. I remember his fist connecting with my face.
The crack of my head against the doorframe.
The way the world went white, then red, then narrowed to a single point of pain above my left eye.
I remember my mother's face afterward. She wasn’t angry, but she wasn’t protective either. She was just tired, almost resigned, like this was inevitable, like I'd brought it on myself.
"You shouldn't provoke him, Riley. You know how he gets."
I knew. I learned. I made myself small and silent and invisible, counted the days until I turned eighteen like a prisoner marking time on a cell wall. And when that birthday finally came, I packed a backpack in the middle of the night and walked out the door without looking back.
Except I did look back. Once. At Mia's window, where a four-year-old face pressed against the glass, watching me leave.
"I'll come back for you," I'd whispered, even though she couldn't hear me. "I swear to God, Mia. I'll come back."
It took me six years. Six years of working three jobs, putting myself through the fire academy, building a life stable enough to convince a judge I could take care of a child.
Six years of watching from a distance while my mother spiraled deeper into addiction and Todd's control tightened like a noose.
Six years of Mia growing up in that house, learning the same lessons I'd learned, building the same walls.
My mother died of an overdose when Mia was ten. I'd been twenty-four, freshly certified, working my first real firefighter job three towns over from West Valley Springs. I'd driven through the night when I got the call, arrived at the hospital just in time to identify the body.
I didn't cry. I couldn't. There was too much to do, too many forms to sign, too many decisions to make. And underneath it all, a fury so hot it burned clean through grief: she'd chosen this. The pills, the men, the slow surrender. She’d chosen all of it over us. Even dead, I couldn’t forgive her.
And then I'd fought. For two years, I'd fought.
Court dates and caseworkers and lawyers I couldn't afford, Todd contesting custody because Mia wasn't his daughter but the survivor benefits were, because hurting me was the only hobby he had left, because men like him didn't let go of things they considered theirs.
I'd won. Temporary custody, then provisional, then something that felt almost permanent. Mia was mine. She was safe, away from him.
Until that moment.
The petitioner further contends that the respondent's work schedule creates an unstable environment for the minor child...
The petitioner notes that the minor child's grades have declined significantly since placement with the respondent, and that school officials have documented behavioral concerns, including social withdrawal and difficulty forming peer relationships...
The petitioner respectfully requests that custody be transferred to the minor child's stepfather, who can provide a stable two-parent household...
Two-parent household. There it was again. Todd and whatever woman he'd manipulated to marry him this time, presenting themselves as the stable option. The normal option.
I locked my phone. Pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.
He wasn't getting her back. I didn't care what I had to do, what I had to sacrifice, what impossible solution I had to find. Todd Harris would not get his hands on my sister again.
Not while I was breathing.
The apartment was quiet when I got home.
I'd practiced my face in the rearview mirror for ten minutes before going inside.
Relaxing my jaw, smoothing the furrow between my brows, arranging my features into something that looked like calm.
Mia could read me too well. She'd learned the same survival skills I had, spent the same years studying adult faces for signs of danger.
If I walked in looking worried, she'd know. And she didn’t need my fear added to everything else she carried.
"Hey, bug."
Mia was at the kitchen table, homework spread in front of her like a barricade. She didn't look up. "Hey."
I dropped my bag by the door, toed off my boots, moved through the routine of coming home.
The apartment was small. Two bedrooms barely big enough for beds, a kitchen that doubled as a living room, a bathroom with a shower that only ran hot for seven minutes.
But it was our home. Clean and safe and the rent paid on time, even if the neighborhood wasn't great and the walls were thin enough to hear the neighbors fighting at 2 AM.
"How was school?"
"Fine."
"Learn anything good?"
"No."
I bit back a sigh. This was how Mia communicated most days. Single syllables, eyes down, walls up. I recognized the strategy. I'd invented it.
"I'm making spaghetti for dinner. Your favorite."
Something flickered across her face. Not quite a smile, but close. "With the good sauce?"
"Is there any other kind?"
I moved into the kitchen, pulling out pots and pans, filling the silence with the clatter of cooking.
The sauce was from a jar. I didn't have time to make it from scratch.
But I'd learned which brand Mia liked best, learned to add extra garlic and a pinch of sugar the way our mother used to before everything went bad.
Our mother. I tried not to think about her too often.
It was easier to be angry than sad, easier to focus on everything she'd done wrong than to remember the woman she'd been before the pills and the men and the slow erosion of everything good.
But sometimes, in moments like this, I caught myself doing something she used to do.
A particular way of stirring the sauce, a hummed melody I didn't consciously remember learning.
And the grief hit me like a punch to the chest.
She'd loved us. In her way, in her broken and insufficient way, she'd loved us. It just hadn't been enough.
"Riley?"
I looked up. Mia had abandoned her homework and was watching me with those dark eyes that saw too much.
"Yeah, bug?"
"Is everything okay?"
The lie came easily. Smoothly. The way lies always did when you'd been practicing them your whole life.
"Everything's fine." The words tasted like ash, but I’d gotten good at swallowing ash. I smiled, letting it reach my eyes, letting it look real. "Just tired. Long shift."
Mia studied me for a moment longer. I held my smile, held her gaze, and refused to look away first.
Finally, she nodded and went back to her homework.
I turned back to the stove and let the mask slip, just for a second. The weight of everything I wasn't saying pressed against my ribs like a physical thing. The hearing. Todd's filing. The caseworker's voice in my head, two-parent household, two-parent household, like a drumbeat I couldn't escape.
Mia fell asleep at nine, worn out from school and homework and the exhausting work of pretending to be okay. I checked on her twice. Old habit, leftover fear. I watched from the doorway as her chest rose and fell in the steady rhythm of deep sleep.
Her hands were loose on the pillow instead of fisted. No bad dreams tonight. It was easy to forget, watching her sleep like this, that she still flinched at raised voices. That she hadn't smiled properly since our mother died.
I closed her door gently and climbed out onto the fire escape.
The night was cool, the sky hazy with light pollution, the city sounds muffled by distance and exhaustion. I pulled my knees to my chest and let myself feel it. All of it, everything I'd been holding back since Sandra's call.
I thought about how it must look to a judge—how out of control it probably seemed.
I’d known that for a while. I’d just been pretending otherwise, the way I pretended about everything else.
My salary covered rent and groceries, barely.
The legal fees were a slow bleed I couldn't stop, eating through savings I didn't have, piling up like a debt I'd never pay off.
The apartment was too small, the neighborhood sketchy enough that I worried every time Mia walked home from school.
My schedule was unpredictable, my job dangerous, my support system nonexistent.
Two-parent household.
I almost laughed. What man in his right mind would volunteer for this? Walk straight into a trap with a woman in the middle of a custody battle, a traumatized twelve-year-old, and a job that kept her away for days at a time. I wasn’t exactly a catch. I was a cautionary tale.
And even if someone did—even if by some miracle I found a person willing to take this on—I didn't know how to let someone in.
Didn't know how to be soft, to be vulnerable, to hand someone else the weapons they could use to destroy me.
I'd spent twenty-six years building walls.
They were the only reason I was still standing.
But they were also the reason I was alone.
I thought about Mia, asleep in her too-small room, trusting me to fix this.
I thought about Todd, probably drunk right now, probably celebrating whatever small victory his lawyers had won this week.
I thought about the hearing in two months, the judge who valued traditional families, the caseworker who meant well but couldn't actually help.
I needed something to change. I needed a miracle.
The fire escape was cold against my back, the night quiet except for distant sirens. Somewhere out there was an answer. A way to keep Mia safe. A way to give the court what it needed to see. A way to stop running on empty.
I just had to find it.
And I was running out of time.