The kids were tired from swimming, and so was I. Ordinary things kept happening around me: towels on the floor, bags to unpack, someone asking where we put the sunscreen. I moved through it all as if I were watching from a few steps away. Life was already too much. I truly felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. My entire life's work—gone because of another person's actions. My husband's. I kept thinking about the version of the weekend I had expected. A normal trip. A little time with family. A chance to breathe. Instead, I was trying to figure out what to tell the kids, what to do about the house, and how many times I could keep calling this a bad stretch before I admitted it was our life. For a long time, I had learned to make things sound smaller. A rough night. A mistake. A problem we could handle privately. I had gotten good at carrying the worry quietly, so nobody else had to see how much space it took up. That night, I couldn't make it small. The arrest was there whether I talked about it or not. The fear was there. The exhaustion was there. And for the first time, I let myself sit with the fact that I did not know how to fix this. And I cried my fucking eyes out.
