Michael fought harder than I expected — right up until his own lawyer told him, privately, that he was going to lose and would come out of it looking far worse for having tried.
I got the house back late that autumn, almost a year to the day after Daniel met me outside those gates with sunflowers. I didn’t move back into the bedroom. I gutted it — new floors, new walls, a wedding quilt long since thrown away. Some people would have sold the place outright rather than live surrounded by that many memories. I understood the impulse. But I’d spent three years having decisions about my own life made in other rooms, by other people, while I sat and absorbed the consequences. Keeping the house was never really about Michael anymore. It was about deciding, for once, what I wanted to walk back into.
Daniel and I are still close. I won’t pretend it turned into some tidy romance — it’s more complicated and more honest than that, still finding its shape in its own time. What I know for certain is that he showed up when he had every reason not to, and asked for nothing in return except that I get to keep what was mine.
As for Michael — he sees Wyatt on weekends now, from what I hear. David moved out of state. I still think, sometimes, about that bedroom, and the bat, and the ninety seconds that cost me three years.
I don’t regret them.
I regret every year before that night — every year I spent believing I was loved by someone who was only ever protecting a trust fund and a lie.
I’m no longer protecting either one.
