Chapter 8 - The Aftermath
The next six months were the hardest, and the happiest, of my life.
The media circus slowly died down. The reporters packed up their cameras and left. The protesters stopped showing up at the house. Life went back to a new kind of normal — quiet, calm, safe.
We moved out of Allison’s West Lake Hills house. It was too big, too full of memories, too many ghosts. We bought a smaller, cozier house in Dripping Springs, on five acres of land, with a big backyard and a garden where we planted 32 sunflowers — one for every year of Allison’s life. Tyler moved into the guest house with his golden retriever, Max, and started his own handyman business, which quickly became the most popular in the Hill Country — everyone in town knew who he was, and they loved him. Chloe called him “Uncle Ty,” and he was the best uncle any little girl could ever ask for — he built her a treehouse, taught her to ride a bike, took her camping every month, let her help him fix things around the house even though she was only five.
Brightside Creative was doing better than ever. Mia was running it now, with Benjamin as the business manager, and they’d turned it into a non-profit — half the profits went to domestic violence shelters across Texas, the other half went to Chloe’s trust fund. They’d renamed the main conference room the “Allison Room,” and covered the walls with her designs, her photos, her favorite quotes. Every year on her birthday, they held a big fundraiser, the Sunflower Gala, which raised millions for women trying to escape abusive relationships.
Vanessa was in a women’s prison outside of Dallas, serving her 15-year sentence. She’d given birth to a baby girl in March, and the paternity test had finally come back — the father was a 22-year-old bartender she’d been seeing on the side, long before she’d met Derek. The baby had been adopted by a nice couple in San Antonio, and Vanessa had signed away all her parental rights. She’d tried to contact me twice, sending letters from prison, begging for forgiveness, asking if she could “be a part of Chloe’s life someday.” I threw both letters in the trash without reading them. She’d had her chance. She’d thrown it away.
Derek and Harold were in maximum security, in separate prisons, in separate parts of the state. Derek’s appeals had all been denied — every single one. The judges who’d heard them all said the same thing: the evidence was overwhelming, the trial had been fair, the sentence was just. He’d never get out. Harold had a heart attack in prison two years into his sentence, and died alone in the infirmary, with no one by his side. I didn’t feel sad. I didn’t feel anything at all.
Chloe was thriving. She was in kindergarten now, the most popular girl in her class, with her mom’s curly brown hair and her mom’s warm brown eyes and her mom’s stubborn, kind heart. She loved sunflowers, and unicorns, and Moana, and helping me bake chocolate chip cookies every Sunday. She still slept with Mr. Floppy every night, even though his ear was sewn back on three times and his fur was falling out. Every night before bed, we’d sit on her bed and talk about Allison — I’d tell her stories about when her mom was a little girl, about how she’d once climbed a 30-foot oak tree to rescue a kitten and gotten stuck for three hours, about how she’d won every art contest she’d ever entered, about how she’d stayed up for three straight days to design a free website for the local animal shelter when she was 16.
One night, about a year after the trial, Chloe asked me the question I’d been dreading.
“Grandma?” she said, her voice small, twisting Mr. Floppy’s ear between her fingers. “Why did the bad people hurt Mommy? Why didn’t she come home?”
I sat down next to her, pulled her onto my lap, and took a deep breath. I’d practiced this a hundred times in my head, with the child psychologist we’d been seeing since the trial, but it was still the hardest thing I’d ever had to say.
“Because the bad people were very, very selfish,” I said, brushing the hair off her face. “They wanted things that weren’t theirs — Mommy’s money, Mommy’s house, Mommy’s life. And they were so greedy, they didn’t care who they hurt to get them. But Mommy was very, very brave. She knew they were coming. And she made sure they couldn’t hurt you. She made sure you’d be safe with me, forever. And she made sure the bad people got punished, so they could never hurt anyone else ever again.”
Chloe was quiet for a minute, thinking. Then she looked up at me, her eyes serious, and said: “Mommy’s a hero. Like Wonder Woman.”
I smiled, tears spilling down my cheeks. “Yeah, bug. She’s exactly like Wonder Woman. The best hero there ever was.”
That weekend, we went to the cemetery. It was Allison’s 33rd birthday. We brought a huge bouquet of sunflowers, her favorite lemon bars, and a drawing Chloe had made — a picture of Allison, with wings and a crown, standing in a field of sunflowers, holding Chloe’s hand. We laid them on her grave, and Chloe sang You Are My Sunshine to her, off-key and loud, the way she always did.
As we were leaving, Chloe stopped, turned around, and waved. “Bye, Mommy! I love you! I’ll see you in my dreams!”
May you like
I took her hand, and we walked back to the car, the Texas sun warm on our faces, the wind blowing the scent of sunflowers through the air. For the first time since the funeral, I didn’t feel angry. I didn’t feel sad. I felt at peace.
Allison was gone. But she was everywhere — in the sunflowers in the garden, in Chloe’s laugh, in every woman who’d found the courage to leave an abusive relationship because of her story, in every kid who got a scholarship from the Brightside foundation. She’d won. She’d beaten them all. The bracelet, the taunts, the lies — none of it had mattered. In the end, love had won. A mother’s love. A grandmother’s love. A sister’s love. The kind of love that never dies, no matter how hard the monsters try to kill it.
