Chapter 6 - Theo, WarmSix months have passed since that night.
My mother moved into a smaller condo across town, paid for out of her monthly allowance from the trust, which I did not touch or reduce, because cruelty was never the goal — safety was. She still calls sometimes. Simone has, slowly, carefully, allowed a handful of short, supervised visits, mostly because she believes Theo deserves the chance to know his grandmother eventually, on terms that don't put him in danger, terms we control completely now instead of terms my mother sets for everyone else.
Simone still has nightmares about that bathroom floor, about the sound of the latch on the nursery door. She's in therapy for it, and slowly, the shaking has stopped, the second-guessing of her own instincts has quieted. Some mornings I still find her standing over Theo's crib for no reason at all, just watching him breathe, just reassuring herself that he's warm.
We bought our own house four months ago — nothing extravagant, nothing that needed a string quartet to fill it — with a nursery that has a window we keep locked, and a baby monitor Simone checks obsessively, and nobody in that house who will ever again tell her she's being hysterical for wanting to make sure her son is safe.
Theo is seven months old now. He has my late father's stubborn chin and Simone's easy laugh, and when I hold him at night, warm and solid against my chest, I think sometimes about how close I came to losing him to a cold room and a party downstairs that never even paused to notice.
I don't regret the moving trucks. I don't regret a single hour of the ninety days I gave my mother instead of none at all.
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What I regret is every year before that night when I let her convince me that keeping the peace was more important than protecting the people who actually needed protecting.
I won't make that mistake again.
