Chapter 7 - What Eli Knew All AlongI named her June, which had been our plan from the beginning, before anyone gave me a reason to believe I'd never get to use the name.
Eli was the one who insisted on being there when we brought her home, standing very seriously by the front door with the stuffed rabbit he'd spent three weeks choosing, the one he'd kept, unable to give it away even in the depths of believing she was gone.
"I told you," he said, when I set her carefully into his arms for the first time, his eight-year-old face doing something complicated between relief and vindication. "I told you Daddy used money for her. Nobody believed me except you."
"I believed you," I said, "the whole time. I was just too scared, for a few days, to let myself believe it fully."
Grant is currently awaiting trial on charges that include infant trafficking, falsifying medical documents, and fraud, alongside eleven other people connected to the network Detective Oyelaran's investigation eventually uncovered — a network responsible, it turned out, for at least six other placements over three years, cases her team is still working through as I write this.
I filed for divorce the week June came home. I have not spoken to Grant since the arraignment, and I do not intend to, beyond whatever the court eventually requires of me regarding custody, which I expect, given the circumstances, will not be extensive.
Eli's pickle jar still sits on his dresser. He hasn't emptied it. When I asked him why, he shrugged in the particular, unbothered way eight-year-olds shrug at questions that feel obvious to them.
"In case something else happens," he said. "So I'm ready."
I didn't try to talk him out of it. Some things a child decides to carry, quietly, on his own — a jar of coins, a rabbit nobody wanted to give away, the plain, stubborn refusal to believe a lie just because every adult around him had already agreed to — turn out to matter more than any of us understood at the time.
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My son saved his sister with sixty-one dollars and forty cents in an old pickle jar, and the simple, unshakeable insistence that what he'd seen with his own eyes was real.
I will be grateful to him for that, in ways I am still learning the words for, for the rest of both our lives.
