Steven was taken in for questioning that evening.
The weeks that followed were not simple.
They are never simple.
There were additional statements, meetings with an attorney, a protective order. Steven moved out within days by legal necessity rather than choice. The divorce process began before the criminal case concluded. Thomas and Lucy relocated to a friend’s apartment while their own situation sorted itself out, and our house became something I was learning to inhabit differently — a space that had contained a person I had misunderstood completely, and that now had to become something I could live in honestly.Lucy started seeing a therapist.
I started seeing one too.
Not because I was the victim in the same way — I want to be precise about that, because precision matters in these situations and the wrong precision can obscure as much as it reveals. Lucy had been targeted. Lucy had been the person standing in the dark wondering if a doorknob was going to turn. Lucy had been the woman in that photograph on the back porch, not knowing she was being watched.
