Heath leaves.

I mean, the plane leaves. I assume he’s on it. I watch the progress of his flight like some sort of crazy person; every time it inches farther away from my location on the screen map, it slices at me.

But then it lands, and I’ve got no way to know where he is or what he’s doing. I consider calling Sierra, but don’t know what to say to her. In the end, I call Bella and explain the whole breakup.

“Ugh, you’re right though— better to know he sucks now than later on. What if you waited for him all those months and then he came back and acted like this? What a waste,” she says.

“Yeah. I know. I guess,” I answer, sighing. “I just feel stupid that I let myself believe it could really be something, you know? I feel like I got conned by my own heart.”

“I think you got conned by Heath’s enormous dick.”

“Bella!” I say, but it makes me laugh, and I’m grateful.

Over the next few days my life swiftly returns to normal, almost alarmingly so. I go to the coffee shop to work. I go by my mom’s house— though not nearly as often, since Heath’s security check made her feel a thousand times safer apparently. I come home. It feels like the week and a half with Heath was some sort of wild vacation, or maybe even a weird fever dream— something that exists outside my real world entirely.

And yet, my heart is heavy in a way I’ve never experienced before. There’s a constant ache in my chest, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night sobbing. Remembering what it felt like to be loved, to be whole…

Of course, it’s only another week before a very different distraction tears into my life— my father’s parole hearing.

“We’ll be fine,” I remind my mother in the car on the way to the courthouse. She’s staring at the outside world like a stranger in a foreign country, noting all the new gas stations and billboards that are old news to me. In between these observations, she frets loudly.

“I don’t know. I could have just sent a victim impact statement.”

“You need to be there. You know the odds of parole are lower if you’re actually there,” I remind her.

“The odds of him getting to me are much higher if I’m there,” she says.

“It’s a courthouse, not a back alley,” I say, and then she comments on a new Denny’s, and we repeat the entire conversation over again.

The courthouse is small and boring, beige walls and square windows, a monument to efficiency and function rather than beauty. We park in the visitor lot, and I steer my mother toward the door so she can’t see the prison bus that’s already arrived with today’s parolees. Thankfully, they appear to have already entered the building, as the bus is sitting empty save for a guard at the door.

We’re checked in by bored looking government employees, then lead to a courtroom that’s as nondescript as the outside of the building. It’s strange, I think as I look around at the other families praying for one parole result or another, how something with such powerful ramifications can happen in such a dull place.

“I wish Heath were with us,” my mom says, and I force a smile.

I didn’t tell her about our breakup. After everything that happened with my father, my mother is afraid of breakups. I worried she’d think Heath might turn into a monster like dad. And also? I didn’t want to admit it to her, how hard I’d fallen in such a short period of time.

“Chad wouldn’t dare mess with us if he saw someone like Heath sitting beside you,” my mother goes on.

“Right,” I say stiffly, licking my lips, trying not to think about where Heath might be right now, or what he might be doing. There’s been nothing in the news about the SEALS, which I suppose is a good thing. No news is good news when it comes to secret missions, right?

“There’s his sister,” my mother says darkly. I turn to see Aunt Lisa entering the room with a handful of cousins and relatives who have been long removed from my life. One, a guy whose name I don’t even remember— is he even directly related to me, or did he marry in to the mess?— glowers at me as they sit down.

“Don’t worry about them,” I say.

“They’ve got more people than us. Are they all going to get to read statements for him?”

“I have no idea,” I answer. “And it doesn’t matter. We’ve got our statements, and they’re powerful. Besides, we’re not trying to prove his guilt this time. We’re just trying to make him finish out the sentence he deserves.” This is a line straight from our lawyer, but one I’ve repeated to mom over and over for the last few days.

Cases tick by slowly, painfully slowly, until my world comes to a stop— my father has entered the courtroom with his lawyer.

For some reason, when I think the word “my father”, I always picture the letters, not the person— like he’s not a human at all. It’s easier to acquiesce the letters with all he did to my mother and me than it is to accept a human hurting her so badly. But there he is, a man, flesh and blood, in a neat suit, freely shaved. He doesn’t look toward my mother and I, but closes his eyes and makes a show of praying as procedures begin. I roll my eyes; my mother trembles.

My father, my aunt, and my cousins read their statements. People from the jail comment on his good behavior. It’s all a song and dance that feels familiar to me, the same tricks that he used to employ back when he and my mother were together— flowers and compliments when needed so he could fall back on them as “proof” that he was, at heart, a good husband after he hit her.

When it’s my turn, I get through my letter without emotion, secretly channeling Heath’s calm, cool demeanor. Perhaps crying would be more powerful, but I refuse to give my father the pleasure— and I say as much.

“Believe me, it would still be a pleasure. He liked causing us pain. He liked how afraid we were of him,” I say.

My mother gives her statement next, stuttering and shaking through it. And then it’s done, and then the Hearing Examiner is speaking, and the room feels still.

“I respect and value the dependent’s progress while in the state’s custody, and appreciate the positive impact he’s had on his fellow inmates through the prison education system and work study programs.” My father almost blushes; his sister and her family smile. “However,” the examiner says, and the smiles vanish. “At this point, I worry that not enough time has passed for me to feel confident that parole would be the safest, best option for the community or the victims. We will revisit parole in the future, and I encourage the defendant to continue to be a model prisoner in the meantime. Parole is denied.”

My aunt screams, throws her purse. The cops in the room are on her quickly, my cousins are shouting at them for manhandling their mother, my father is being lead away with his head down, there’s shouting, another cop is ushering my mother and me from the room—

And it’s done. We’re in the cold, marble-floored hallway, alone.

“I guess…that’s it,” I say, stunned at how swiftly it all went down. I can still hear Aunt Lisa shouting, and I know she’s being arrested.

“It’s done,” my mother says in a tiny voice, more like an animated mouse’s than a human’s. She listens to the chaos behind the door for another moment, then turns to me, eyes trembling. “Do you think we should go out to lunch?”

My eyes widen. “To lunch?”

“Yes.”

“Uh…yes. Yes, that’d be great,” I say, the words mumbled and clumsy. I expected her to insist on going straight home regardless of the results today, especially given all the drama we just witnessed. “Where to?” I ask.

“Oh, you pick,” my mom says. The fear is still in her voice, but I see victory in her eyes. I see my mother the way she used to be, back before she locked her doors to the world.

I grin. “How about we go someplace new?” I ask, and she nods enthusiastically.