“Do you still love Daddy?”
I looked at him in the dim night-light glow and said, “Why do you ask?”
He studied the blanket in his lap.
“Because he was bad. Really bad. But he’s still my daddy. And sometimes I miss him. I don’t know if that’s wrong.”
My heart cracked open quietly.
I pulled him into my arms.
“It’s not wrong,” I told him. “He is your father. And the part of him you knew—the part that took you to the park and played catch and tucked you in—that felt real to you. Missing that is not wrong.”
“But he tried to hurt us.”
“Yes,” I said. “And that was horrible. It was unforgivable. Both things can be true at the same time. You can miss the dad you thought you had and still be angry about what he did.”
He was quiet for a long time.
Then he asked, “I saved you, right?”
I held his face in my hands.
“You saved us,” I said. “You saved me, and you saved yourself. You are my hero, Kenzo.”
A small smile lifted the corners of his mouth.
That was the first moment I knew, with something like certainty, that we would survive this.
Not quickly. Not neatly. But truly.
I started working again.
At first it was at a nonprofit in Atlanta serving women escaping abuse. The work was hard, underfunded, emotionally brutal, and more meaningful than anything I had done in years. I understood the women who came through those doors in a way I wished I never had to. I knew the shame. The confusion. The private humiliation of realizing how long you explained away the unexplainable.
Most of all, I knew how powerful it was to hear someone say, “This is not your fault.”
Because it had never been.
A year later, Zunaira made me an offer that changed the shape of the rest of my life.
“You have instinct for this,” she said. “And steel. Go to law school.”
I laughed at first.
Then I realized she meant it.
At thirty-four, I went back.
I enrolled in an accelerated law program, studied after Kenzo went to bed, lived on coffee and legal pads and stubbornness, and eventually passed the Georgia bar.
It was one of the hardest things I had ever done.
It was also one of the clearest.
I joined Zunaira’s practice and built my work around family law and domestic violence cases. I took everything that had nearly destroyed me and turned it into something useful. Some pain never becomes noble, no matter what people say. But it can become purposeful. It can become a bridge for someone else.
Three years after the fire, Kenzo and I moved into a real house again.
Nothing grand. Nothing performative. Just a small, honest place that belonged to us.
Kenzo chose a blue paint color for his room and insisted he was too grown for superhero curtains now.
Instead he covered the walls with posters of Black astronauts, engineers, and scientists.
“When I grow up,” he announced one day, “I’m going to be an engineer. Or maybe an architect. I haven’t decided.”
