I stood at the foot of her bed. I didn’t yell. I didn’t raise my voice. I just looked at her with an absolute, freezing emptiness.
“The kids are alive,” I said. The quietness of my voice seemed to echo louder than a shout.
Delaney closed her eyes, a tear instantly tracking down her unbruised cheek. “I know. The police came. They told me.”
“What did you do, Delaney?”
She couldn’t look at me. She spoke to her hands, her voice a ragged whisper. “I was just so tired, Rowan. I was so overwhelmed. I met a guy. He said we’d just go for a quick drink. I put them to bed. I locked the doors. I thought I’d be back in two hours. Just two hours to feel like a normal person.”
“You left a six-year-old in charge of a toddler with nothing but half a bottle of ketchup in the fridge.”
She let out a suffocated sob, bending forward over her cast. “I know. We argued in the car. He was driving too fast. I hit the dashboard and… everything went dark. I woke up yesterday and… oh god, Rowan, I didn’t know.”
“Micah fed her dry crackers because she was starving, Delaney. She almost died of dehydration. He sat in that silent house for three days, thinking his sister was rotting away, waiting for a mother who never came.”
She clamped her hand over her mouth, wailing now, the sound raw and pathetic.
I felt no pity. Only the cold, mechanical need to protect my blood. “I’ve already filed the emergency injunction,” I told her. “I am taking full, legal, physical custody. You will have no access to them unless a judge forces me to allow it. And I will fight to make sure they never do.”
She looked up, her face a mask of absolute horror. “Rowan, please. I made a mistake. Are you taking my babies away forever?”
“You did that yourself,” I turned on my heel.
“Rowan, wait!” she pleaded. “How are they? Please, just tell me how they are!”
I paused at the door, glancing back over my shoulder. “Elsie will physically recover. But Micah… I don’t know if he’ll ever trust anyone again.”
I walked out, leaving her sobbing in the sterile room. I thought I had won. I thought cutting her out would fix the infection in our family.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
That first week back at my house was a descent into psychological hell. Micah couldn’t sleep. He shadowed Elsie so obsessively that if she closed the bathroom door, he would bang on it until his hands bled, terrified she was dying inside. I burned dinners. I shrank their clothes. I existed on three hours of sleep a night.
On the fourth night, at 2:00 AM, a blood-curdling scream ripped through the drywall. I bolted out of bed, grabbing a heavy brass lamp, convinced someone was breaking in. I sprinted into Micah’s room.
He was thrashing in his sheets, eyes wide open but completely unseeing. “Wake up, Elsie! Wake up, please!” he shrieked, clawing at his own face.
Chapter 6: Learning a New Shape of Family
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