She said nothing. There was nothing to say. He sat down in the chair beside the bed, because he found that he was too tired to stand.
“I’m not here to tell you it’s okay,” he said. “It isn’t. There’s a DCS case, and there will be a hearing. I’m going to ask for primary custody, and I think you know why.”
“Yes.”
“But I’m also not going to tell the court you didn’t love them.”
She looked at him then, her eyes red and enormous.
“You love them,” he said. “You also have an illness, and you made a terrible choice because of it. Both of those things are true.”
“I’m so ashamed,” she whispered.
“Good,” he said, without cruelty. “Be ashamed. Then go get better.”
Dale Pruitt was arrested at a gas station outside Knoxville two weeks later, carrying a bag of pills that detectives said matched what had been found in Whitney’s motel room. He faced charges that included distribution and reckless endangerment. He’d left the motel when Whitney collapsed, taking her phone, and had never called for help.
The case against Whitney was handled differently. The district attorney, advised by Detective Reyes and Priya Nambiar, agreed to a diversion program in place of prosecution on the neglect charge, on conditions: inpatient treatment, a drug court docket, and supervised visitation until the court approved more.
At the custody hearing in October, Brent sat across the courtroom from his ex-wife and felt the strangest thing. It wasn’t triumph. It was grief, the quiet kind, for the woman she had been and might be again.
The judge granted him primary custody and ordered supervised visits for Whitney every Saturday. She would be reassessed in six months.
Afterward, in the hallway, she stopped him.
