Naomi didn't take him back right away. Trust, she told him, wasn't something a verdict could restore on its own.
Some nights that first month, after the twins were finally asleep, she sat alone with a notebook. She wrote down everything she'd lost that year, in plain, unflinching sentences. The apartment above the laundromat. The job interviews that ended the moment someone recognized her name. The nights she'd cried quietly so the babies wouldn't wake. She wasn't writing it for Everett. She was writing it so she'd never forget how close she'd come to losing everything. And how she'd survived it anyway, alone. Forgiving him, she decided, didn't mean pretending none of that had happened. It just meant deciding not to let it define whatever came next.
"I believe you now," she said one evening. She was watching him feed Jonah on the porch. "But believing isn't the same as forgetting."
