After His Heart Transplant My Husband Forgot His Daughter Chapter 24
In the sixth year of her sentence, Renata applied for early release.
In her application, she wrote that she had repented and wanted to return to her son, Finn, to make up for lost time.
The prosecutor’s office notified us that we could submit a response.
Mom didn’t make the decision for me.
“Do you want to answer?”
I opened the old case file on my computer.
Renata’s forged foreclosure notice still carried its fake red stamp. The 529 account records still showed the clean transfer of forty-eight thousand dollars. The pier surveillance video was still frozen on the second Grady turned away from me.
Every piece of evidence was exactly the same.
I didn’t replay the recordings.
I simply resubmitted my original victim impact statement and attached my most recent medical evaluation.
My right hand had recovered to sixty percent function, but I still needed the brace. The nerve damage was irreversible. In winter, the cold made it ache without pause, and after long hours of drawing, my whole arm would spasm.
These weren’t sentences written to win sympathy.
They were the outcome of her saying, Shame Elodie only injured her hand.
At the hearing, Renata cried. “I was just terrified of losing everything.”
One of the review board members asked, “So you chose to put another child at risk?”
At the hearing, Renata cried. “I was just terrified of losing everything.”
One of the review board members asked, “So you chose to put another child at risk?”
“I didn’t mean for her to get hurt.”
“Then why did you say it was a ‘shame’ in the recording?”
Renata’s tears faltered.
She fell back on her old defense, pushing the blame onto Grady.
“He’s the one who ran to Finn first. I didn’t control his legs.”
Six years on, she still only knew how to cast herself as the weakest one in the room and wait for someone else to carry the weight of what she’d done.
Grady submitted a written statement.
He didn’t plead for her. He wrote only:
“I bear my own responsibility for what happened to Elodie. Renata’s responsibility for staging a false emergency should not be diminished because of my own wrongdoing.”
The early release request was denied.
Before the hearing closed, the board informed Renata that her next review would center on whether she had shown a true understanding of the harm she had caused to a minor.
Her face went pale.
She finally grasped that no amount of tears could erase what was on that surveillance tape.
The screen went dark.
Mom asked me, “Does that feel good?”
I flexed my stiff right hand inside the brace.
“No.”
“No.”
“Then why submit anything?”
“Because the consequences are still here.”
I tightened the brace.
“So her sentence should be, too.”
That was the last time I took part in Renata’s life.
When she got out, where she lived—it had nothing to do with me anymore.
I had given the necessary evidence to the people whose job it was to judge.
I didn’t want to keep looking back for the rest of the road.