He Sent It Before He Left

Ryan was with me every day of the trial.

He was also with me on the morning of March fourth, when our son was born in a hospital room with a window that faced east and the morning light coming in at the angle that makes everything look like it is worth surviving to see. Ryan held him first because I asked him to, because I had been holding him for nine months and I wanted his father to have the first look, and Ryan held him in his dusty hands, the ones that had opened a back door hard enough to shake the cabinet handles, with the careful absolute gentleness of someone who understands the difference between the things that require force and the things that require its opposite.

We named him James.

Victoria received a sentence that included the fraud charges and the criminal threatening and the conspiracy to commit the harm that had been documented on eleven seconds of footage that the jury watched twice in deliberations. Her attorney had tried to argue that the iron was never intended to make contact. The footage was not ambiguous on the question of intent, and neither was the sentence she said about being needed.

I kept the cardigan. The button is still in the collar. I have not worn it since the trial because I have not needed to, but I have not removed it either, because Ryan sent it to me from a base half a world away and it was the right thing to have, and some things you keep not because you expect to use them again but because they represent a moment when someone who loved you thought ahead on your behalf.

Ryan thinks about things ahead. He always has. That is one of the things his mother never understood about him, and one of the reasons she was wrong about what he saw in me, and one of the things James is going to understand about his father long before he is old enough to explain it.

Some people prepare for the worst because they are pessimists.