Wade moved in with Lorraine after the settlement. The restitution payments started small. He had to find employment first. He picked up part-time HVAC work with a different company about six weeks later. The payments come out of his wages automatically.
Whether I’ll ever see all $81,000 back is uncertain, but the repayment order is enforceable. And the criminal fraud referral sits in Bridget Kowalsski’s filing cabinet like a loaded weapon that never needs to be fired as long as he keeps his end of the agreement.
Kendra blocked Wade on everything the day after the settlement conference. His social media went dark within a week. I don’t know what his life looks like now.
And honestly, I don’t spend time thinking about it.
This was never about destroying Wade.
It was about getting Bria out.
Something I didn’t expect happened about three weeks after Bria moved in. Lorraine Purcell called me. Not Wade—Lorraine. Her voice was different than I’d ever heard it. Smaller. She didn’t defend Wade. She didn’t make excuses.
She just asked if she could see Bria.
I said yes, because Lorraine is Bria’s grandmother. Because Lorraine spent three years trapped between a son she couldn’t control and a grandchild she didn’t want to lose. Because this was never about punishment. It was about putting Bria somewhere safe.
And Lorraine, despite everything, loved that little girl.
Lorraine came over on a Sunday afternoon. She brought homemade sugar cookies, the kind with the sprinkles that Bria apparently used to help her make back when she spent time at Lorraine’s house. Bria ran to the door and hugged her. They sat on the couch together and watched cartoons and ate cookies while I pretended to clean the kitchen.
At one point, I glanced over and saw Lorraine wiping her eyes with the back of her hand very quietly so Bria wouldn’t see.
We didn’t talk about Wade.
We didn’t need to.
Bria’s school called me six weeks after she moved in. Not a problem call.
A good one.
Her teacher, Mrs. Callaway, sent an email that I read three times and then saved in a folder on my phone. She wrote, “I wanted to let you know that Bria has been a completely different child. She participates in class. She laughs. She brought a drawing for our bulletin board last week and was so proud of it. I don’t know what changed at home, but whatever it is, thank you.”
Perfect attendance since the move. Not one absence. Not one.
Bria sleeps through the night now.
She didn’t before.
I learned this gradually, not all at once—the way children reveal things in pieces over weeks through small comments at bedtime. She told me she used to lie awake in the Salem house listening for the sound of Wade’s truck pulling into the driveway. Sometimes it came late after midnight.
Sometimes it didn’t come at all.
A seven-year-old lying awake in a dark room listening for a father who wasn’t coming home.
I think about that and I have to close my eyes and breathe for a second before I can keep going.
She doesn’t listen for trucks anymore. She sleeps with Gerald curled up beside her and a nightlight shaped like a star that she picked out at the dollar store. She sleeps the way a seven-year-old is supposed to sleep—deeply, easily, without fear.
One evening, the kind of night in Virginia where the dark comes early and the air through the window smells like cold leaves and someone’s fireplace a few streets over, I was washing dishes. Bria was at the kitchen table drawing the way she does most evenings now. Gerald was asleep on the radiator, which he considers his personal property.
Bria slid a piece of paper across the table.
“This is for you, Auntie.”
I dried my hands and picked it up.
Three figures. The tall one on the left had brown hair and was labeled “auntie” in careful letters. The small one in the middle had pigtails and a big smile—“me.” And the third figure floating just above them, with bright yellow wings and an even bigger smile, was labeled “mommy.”
At the bottom of the page, in her best seven-year-old handwriting:
“My family.”
I looked at the drawing.
I looked at Bria.
She was watching me with those eyes—Sienna’s eyes—waiting to see if I understood.
I didn’t cry.
I reached across the table and held her hand for a moment. Small fingers. Warm. Trusting. The same hand that had grabbed mine a few months ago and whispered a secret that changed everything.
And I thought: Sienna always had a plan.
Even from wherever she is now, she had a plan.
She labeled a folder “just in case.” She wrote a letter she hoped no one would ever need to read. She put my name on a piece of paper at a notary office on Campbell Avenue and trusted that if the worst happened, I’d find it.
And I did.
Three years late, but I found it.
Thank you so much for staying with me until the very end of this one. It truly means the world to me.
