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“You’re not going to let him take me…are you?”

Henry’s breath shudders. His voice is gravel and steel when he answers. “Not a God damn chance.”

Dallas nods slowly, tucks himself closer. Like that promise might be enough to keep the cracks from widening.

And tonight…maybe it is.

Chapter Thirty-Five

I JUST WANT TO GO HOME

HENRY

Family Court—9:12 a.m.

The room feels like fucking a morgue.

Sterile. Cold. Not the kind of cold you shiver through, but the kind that settles under your skin and makes your heart quiet down, like it already knows nothing good lives here.

The walls are beige—drab and lifeless, like someone tried to paint over grief and gave up halfway. The fluorescent light above us buzzes with that soft, maddening flicker, like it’s just as restless as the people trapped beneath it.

The entire Wilder clan including the Crosby brothers fill the row behind us—a silent, steady wall of support.

Lou sits next to me in the front row, hands locked in her lap so tight her skin's long lost its blood circulation. Her leg keeps bouncing, jittering against mine. She hasn’t spoken since we walked through those doors. Not since we saw him.

Dallas’s father.

The man who disappeared for nearly a decade—who knew exactly who he was leaving them with. A woman diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. A woman who refused medication. Who spiraled in and out of psychotic breaks until their home became a war zone. Dallas was barely old enough to tie his shoes when he started learning to survive her—ducking and hiding, trying to protect his little brother from things no child should ever see.

This piece of shit? He knew, and still, he left.

Now he’s here. Sitting three rows ahead in a stiff, pressed shirt like it erases the blood on his hands. Like he’s got the right to show up and want something.

His lawyer leans in, whispers something greasy in his ear, and he nods like a man who thinks time makes him innocent.

My jaw clenches. Lou’s knee starts bouncing harder.

The judge enters.

We rise.

We sit.

Rue takes the stand.

She looks polished today. Formal. But her voice has that same sharp edge I’ve heard around our kitchen table after too many late nights and too few wins since all this went down. She meets Lou’s eyes before she speaks, and something quiet passes between them—something sacred.

“Dallas Murphy is a nine-year-old child who has endured sustained, complex trauma,” Rue begins, her voice sharp and deliberate in the echoing quiet of the courtroom. “He was abandoned by his biological father and left in the full-time care of his mother—a woman with a documented diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. A woman who refused medication. Refused treatment, and whose untreated psychosis escalated to catastrophic levels.”

The air shifts—tightens.

“There are multiple reports of prolonged neglect and emotional abuse,” she continues. “He was isolated for days at a time. Locked in closets. Deprived of food, of sleep, of basic human care. He was screamed at, blamed for things beyond his understanding, punished for imagined threats inside her head. He was a child living in a war zone no one could see.”

I glance at Lou. She hasn’t moved—jaw clenched, eyes locked straight ahead, white-knuckled grip still trembling in her lap.

Rue pauses for just a second. Then drops the weight of it.

“Dallas witnessed the death of his younger brother during one of his mother’s psychotic episodes.”